Tag: prototype

Rustic candles to repurpose waste lipids, and harken back to a bygone era

Years ago, households made something called a “prairie candle” using tallow rendered from animals. Candles are a wick surrounded by a fat/lipid, and households would use what they had, which was often tallow or even lard.

One Thanksgiving season, a family member killed a deer. After saying a short prayer and thanking the deer for their sacrifice, I asked if I could take and render the tallow. I read that you could make grease, polish, candles, and other things.

I decided to make candles. The first batch made 5 candles, set in mason jars. They worked! The best story from the first batch is that my cousin’s dog ate one.

I found a local game processing ‘facility’ (every locality has a guy), got some new inputs, and made a second larger batch of candles, this time with scents and a variety of wicks. I wanted to test them out.

It turns out that the candles do not perform as well as the candles that we are used to–candles made from paraffin, beeswax, or even soy.

The first brand vision was to create a high-end “rustic outdoors” brand and sell the candles at a high price.

I still like the idea. I like taking any “waste” product and turning it into something useful.

My future vision is to do a different product from the same input, such as cute fire-starters, and have them be made by local non-profit kids groups, like boy and girl scouts, as fundraisers. (Candles would still be an option, too.)

The vision would be to setup the product as a “kit” that local groups could follow the directions to make and sell, potentially under an umbrella brand.

Spacephones were a prototype isolation heaphone especially for a more enjoyable spoken-word audio experience in loud settings.

Have you ever turned up your headphone volume to hear over loud noise, and then later, when you are in a quieter place, you turn on your headphones again and volume feels like it is set at jet-engine levels?

That’s how loud you were listening to the volume before, and that’s not healthy. The sound levels in the NYC subway system can breach 100 decibels. And when you turn up your headphones to hear over it, you’re essentially doubling the sound.

I wanted headphones that would block out the outside noise so that I could maintain a modest volume level. There are some specialty headphones for drummers, then there are “active noise cancellation” powered headphones.

The prototypes were made by taking apart professional-grade hearing protectors, off-the-shelf headphone drivers, and then recombining them together into one product.

They worked great (I still use them), but I was concerned that the market for such high-performance sound-isolation headphones would be limited. The product drawbacks were the large size and the tight fit.

Spacephones are a fun product that I use to this day, and were an opportunity to practice some soldering and prototyping, while creating another product-market outline.

Meal Mix was blend of whole grain and protein powders, flavored with cocoa and cinnamon, to be blended into shakes.

Before the modern “Soylent” drink, I was experimenting with deconstructed nutrition, but in a whole-foods model. The experiment was to take the ingredients of nutritious whole-grain foods and blend them in a manner such that when you mixed them into a shake, they would taste…good enough.

I experimented with the blend, and put together a complete nutritional analysis, including micronutrients. In case you are wondering, the star of the blend was oat flour, which has both a strong nutrition profile, and a pleasant semi-sweet flavor.

I tried both 3-pound bagged product packaging, and pre-mixed bottles.

The shelf-life of the bottles was clearly not long enough. After selling some dozens of the 3-pound bags to “early adopters”, I decided that the flavor really just wasn’t where it needed to be.

Personally, I repurposed the remainder of the Meal Mix and made weekly batches of muffins, and at the office I became the muffin-guy.

After seeing where the modern incarnation of “meal replacement shakes” has gone, I’m happy with setting this project aside.