Further thoughts on realizing the value of old patents....

Hi Gordon,

There are some great ideas in your post! Thanks... :)

What I was thinking of was targeting the home hobbyist....

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes visit my uncle's place, who was then in his 20s and a university student....

He loved the magazine, Popular Mechanics. Inside each issue of Popular Mechanics are projects you can do.... Things you can build.

I remember my uncle also had (if I remember correctly) a book which collected many of these projects from Popular Mechanics magazine. Some of these projects really captured my imagination!

One which has really stuck in my mind is a little toy "air car" or toy hovercraft.... I remember, according to the plan there was a little motor, which drove a fan, and at the bottom a "skirt" around the device (which is the basic design for a hovercraft). The air was sucked in from the top of the car, and pushed out through the bottom so that the toy was sitting on a cushion of air....

I never made one, but I can imagine that it probably also caught the imagination of others like me too! People who like to create things with their hands for fun....

I've looked through the patent search engine for old expired toy patents, and some of them would be fun to make.... And to play wi-- uh, I mean for the kids to play with! :)

I think there could be lots of ideas for interesting items that home hobbyists could make for fun, sitting there in old expired patents.... I haven't tested this idea, though, but it's an idea I've had from reading the section in BYBA on hot sheets.... :)

So, what I was thinking was that, if you found patents which were fun for the home hobbyist to make, each patent could be turned into a "hot sheet" in itself, or a set of plans.... However, it's an idea which I haven't tested yet....

By the way, Gordon, I LOVE that idea of "stored value".... Just sitting around, waiting to be realized. It's a brilliant idea.... I must re-read my copy of the Chattel Report! :)

- Dien

Hi y'all,

Speaking of hovercraft, one of the next duo of my favorite TV show, "Junkyard Wars," is about building hovercraft from scrap.

It will be on Wednesday night on TLC.

Best,

-Boyd "Monkey Wrench" Stone

Hi Boyd,

Thanks for noting that! I'm not sure if I'll be able to see the show here, but it sounds incredible! :)

I've linked below to an expired patent (from 1982) for a simple hovercraft toy, which the patent says could also be made into a full-sized vehicle!

(To see the full patent, click on the link below then click on "View Images".....)

Actually, this one looks even simpler to make than the one I remember seeing as a kid in that book from "Popular Mechanics".... :)

- Dien




Hovercraft toy....

Dien and Boyd,

Since I am a little older than both of you (I was a teenager in the '60s), I remember a plastic model that I built probably about 1962 of a hovercraft. This unit looked similar to the vehicle used by The Jetsons cartoon family, if you are familiar with it. If I remember correctly, it had two seats. The air "machine" was in the rear behind the passenger compartment. On the bottom of the hovercraft were several jets where the air sprayed out to generate the cushion of air.

The model had a plastic hose going to the unit so you could blow in air to simulate a hovercraft experience.

I believe this was supposed to be a model of an experimental unit that one of the big auto makers were working on, but I have not heard any more about it since. Maybe they got distracted building lunar landers...

JDB