Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Making of gear

DMM making carabiners on UK Climbing

Marketing for Carabiners at UWYO

DMM making ice tools on How It's Made

How people get money

So in my quest to decide if I should start a climbing gear company with my four ideas for radically  different new gear I've been talking to the other outdoor company people. Ice Holdz and the new Central Rock Gym in Worcester to find out how they got money before they had anything to sell. Ice Holdz was started by a couple who boot strapped it with their own money all the way to having a product and traveling to sell the things. Central Rock Gym was two brothers recently graduated from college who saw the need and said if we can't raise the money in three months to do this then we'll give up. Now it's working out really well they've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and the gym is almost done and they even had 50 people apply to work there. Including a layer who has his own practice and thought it would be cool. 

So that might be an option go full bore on this until say November when I have to start paying back my student loans and I will definitely know after several months of product development and marketing and fund raising if this thing can work. 

In other news running the last two days has gone well and I went climbing with Jeff this morning and we messed around on a 5.10d at crow hill. Neither one of us got more than 10 feet off the ground. Finally, I'm going to go up the hill and work on simulations for a few hours after I eat and shower cause I haven't don't any research lately.

Friday, February 27, 2009

The waiting game

I've probably spent the better part of three hours today waiting on my finite element software to run a little faster so that I can fix a node for a 3D stress analysis simulation of the heat treating process that I have to complete for my research. The past two weeks I have finally gotten several simulations to work although my meshes have some distortion problems with 547 or so warnings for element geometry out of 30,000 elements. Fortunately that means no errors which is really what I was concerned about. So I sit here trying to be patient waiting for the servers to register that I clicked a node so that I can confirm the region for the boundary condition.

In other news, I approached a second company today about my ice axe after the first one said they had no interest. The farther time goes without finding a job the more I feel that maybe I should start a company making outdoor gear. Besides the ice axe I have ideas for a tent, pants, jackets, and carabiners. I've been going to this entrepreneur lunch series WPI has been having this past week and I decided I'd get a blog and put myself out there. I've also been learning about some of the basics of marketing and I've decided that when it comes to marketing over the internet or to climbers I would be great because that's what I am: a climber and an avid internet user.

Finally, I have a workout this afternoon with the track team and on my comeback from plantar fasciitis I'm so unsure about it. I mean it hasn't felt great this week and the two hour long run in the rain Sunday was not awesome for my immune system and I've been coughing all week. 

All I want to do is go climbing right now, even though my foot will probably hate me. So I talked to Jeff and since the machine shop was off limits due to a professional visit we couldn't machine any ice axe today so we talked for ten minutes and the result is that we're going climbing tonight at 7 PM. Outside. I haven't really done any climbing in the dark so it should be a great learning experience. It was warm today (49F) so the snow has probably all melted and it will quite possibly be soaking wet on the rock. I don't really care I'm going anyway.