[MadMax]

I've been having some fun noodling around with new ideas. The assembly line for the Tornado grenade is working a lot more smoothly now (took a bloody year to work out A LOT of bugs) so I finally get to play in the shop a little more.

I always like to have a few new doodads on the cook because product design is a long process where I go down a lot of blind design threads, basically I bumble around a bunch like an ant meandering towards a crumb. Convoluted crooked path full of dead end turnarounds and loops. Eventually I get to the end and a proof of concept works. I start to work out a lot of bugs and usage problems and clean things up. Product design for me is accumulating a lot of "know how NOT" and finally cleaning up a tiny chip of gold at the bottom which is a tiny bit of "know how". Sometimes I just give up and abandon a product work because there's either no product (no interesting potential or it's just plain dangerous) or I find the product completely impractical. I dump about half of my product ideas for either of the two reasons. A further chuck of the remaining ideas get backburnered because they're either not as interesting as the others, or they've got such long work ahead that I decide to chase something closer to completion.

R&D is a long road for me!