Re-engineered: KIWI ‘CAN-DO’ REDEFINES QUAD BIKE SAFETY Unitec’s Simon Hartley has poured in the time to evolve an idea, and when he presents the completed project it may very well be the farmer’s quad bike of the future. It’s dirty and dusty. Things are piled high; equipment is covered in a manner that fits with ‘getting to it later’ more than preservation… but I get the impression that it will get done. Parts scatter the little wooden shed that is tucked away on Unitec’s Mt Albert Campus and my inquisitive eyes scan to do the math; to add all the pieces up. Plastic components here. Electrical parts there. Lots of scribbles on paper. A big, heavy looking thing that I have no idea of its nature only later to be described as a hydrogen cell. A bin is laden with the energy drink ‘V’. Actually, there are a lot of plastic parts about. I pop my head out the door: not a lemon tree in sight. Perhaps there should be. Bert Munro would have liked that and such is the feel of the 6 metre by 6 metre ‘workshop’ shed. But Bert’s thing was speed, while Simon’s is safety. The eyes fail Engineering News, math not being my strongest point and the complexity of parts fall far beyond my engineering and scientific knowledge base. Time to use the ears. And as the Masters’ student unravels the mystery, those scattered pieces come succinctly together and add up to a whole - innovation. The new-age quad bike, a safer more user-friendly bike. A future bike built to save lives. There is something quintessentially Kiwi about taking an existing product and re-engineering it to be better and to suit a purpose. Whether this is a genetic trait or not (most likely) isn’t the issue, but there is indeed something in our blood that makes us want to improve on what we’ve got. Even more likely is that it has been engrained through geographic isolation and a lack of resources at our fingertips. That strive to ‘improve upon’ runs strong in the veins of Unitec’s Simon Hartley. He has innovated, trialled (and errored) and personally sweated the hard yards of some 7,500-plus hours, while including his fair share of Kiwi No. 8 Wire problem-solving along the way. But for Simon, relatively new technologies in 3D printing used during his Masters of Design project have virtually eliminated such isolation, reduced costs and essentially propped up the budget of a project that is set to produce possibly the safest quad bike in the world. Engineering News’ publisher and editor, Greg Robertson, sits down with him and an idea that is soon to be a reality that the country can be proud of. 14 October 2016 I pop my head out the door: not a lemon tree in sight. Perhaps there should be. Bert Munro would have liked that… K I W I I N N O VAT I O N
EN-Oct16
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