We are extremely excited to start in on this competition alongside so many other talented designers/engineers/thinkers/makers. Here’s wishing everyone a fun, educational, and innovative experience!

In this log, we’re hoping to share and document our journey from identifying the pain-point to customer research to design considerations to how we’ll approach manufacturing. And to kick it all off, we thought we’d share what problem we’re trying to solve, and the kind of customer we’re designing for.

Everybody loves a bench grinder -- It’s the go-to for shaving down material on a workpiece, cleaning up that weld job, prepping a surface for an adhesive, grinding ye old tungsten, and lots more. But at the end of the day, it’s still a high friction wheel with a lot of inertia and a mean top speed. Add human fingers, hands, hair, etc, and you can end up with pain, mess and sometimes serious injuries. To complicate matters, the momentum from operation doesn’t just disappear when you hit the off-switch. Any tool-titan can tell you that, like many other shop tools, the transition from high-speed-danger to safely-stopped-wheel on a grinder takes some serious time, often spinning in near silence.

With Grinder-Minder, we’re hoping to remove that danger from the equation with innovative tech and a safer-for-all approach. So who would benefit from this solution? Simply put, we would expect everyone who owns a grinder to see value in a safer work-space! We want to offer industrial solution quality at a consumer level price point.

Our next steps in our journey are to:

• begin designing the specifics of the technical solution,
• evaluate competing solutions,
• test our assumptions about our customer and their pain-point,
• and begin diving into the design requirements necessary to take this from concept to ready-to-manufacture product.

If you have some insights on what will make or “brake” (Ha! Get it?) this product, leave a comment! We’ll be extremely appreciative of any insights or feedback we can get from the community. Thanks all!