Jim Thompson

Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

Sometimes you can make innovation work by looking at other ideas far out of your field.

Here is an example.

I read a few weeks ago about a young lady in high school that has come up with a suture that changes color if your wound becomes infected! Wow! And I thought carrying tampons to use to plug bullet holes to prevent bleed out was cool. I hope she gets here patent and is able to protect it.

Then I got to thinking, how could we provide this or a similar concept in paper machines (not the tampons, the suture idea). Well, what if our clothing manufacturers could weave some sort of color changing yarn in press felts that could change color if the nip got a little open somewhere across the press? It would not be a true nip impression (likely not that accurate), but it could give an operator a rough sense of a problem.

Or what if shims for aligning motors and pumps could change color to warn one of a "soft foot" when one is doing one of these installations?

How about a pulper rotor with colored rods built into it so that when it wore down enough to need changing, the rods are exposed, and one can just look into the pulper to see if they have worn beyond the manufacturer's recommended life?

I have mentioned this before--back in the old days, when we had decent late-night comedians (Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman), how did their writers come up with a monologue every night? They slammed together two or more disjointed news items of the day for each joke. In fact, once you figured it out, it became a bit boring to watch them--the technique was used in half the jokes each night.

You can be creative the same way. Take two disjointed problems in your mill and see if you can slam them together and come up with a solution.

One conundrum that has bothered me for years is this. Take a vessel that is supposed to be leak free. It develops the tiniest hole, and it is a disaster. Take a device that has a bunch of tiny holes, say a hydraulic control valve. Plug one of those tiny holes--disaster. How do we get in these messes?

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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