A good friend of mine, Richard Warren, came up with a new invention. As with most inventions, its roots came from a need.
He was always building, fixing or repairing things and in that process was frequently bending over to pickup stuff on the ground or floor. He always wore a pair of eyeglasses or sunglasses, but often would put the eyewear in his shirt pocket when he didn’t need it. Now, here is the problem. When he would bend over to pick up whatever, his eyeglasses would fall out of his pocket, landing on the floor and scratching the lenses. He was going to put an end to this. There were some eyeglass accessories on the market including lanyard of all different colors and materials and of course his Optometrist or eye doctor told him to put his eyewear in a eyeglass case when he wasn’t using them. Well, neither of these solutions worked for Rich. He didn’t like glasses hanging around his neck when he wasn’t using them or carrying around his eyeglass case just wasn’t going to happen. He liked to put his glasses in his shirt pocket! He figured if he could just design a clip of some sort which he could attach to the frame of the eyeglasses, he could then put his glasses or sunglasses in his shirt pocket and they would stay there even when he bent over.
Being a Mechanical Engineer, Rich had taken many courses on materials with many different properties, sizes, hardness’s and spring tensions. He had the skills of being able to weld, form and machine steel to size and shape required. With his garage full of scrap steel, pipe and hardware from past projects, he could build the forming and cut off press to make a clip that could be attached to the eyeglass frame. But how do you attach a clip to a pair of glasses; Glue, epoxy or some type of adhesive? And then one day he was repairing some electrical wire on his boat and after soldering the wires together was finishing the electrical connection by heating some heat shrink tubing over the exposed wires and the light went off! He could use heat shrink tubing to attach a leg of the clip to his glasses. He then designed a clip that met all his requirements.
He built a forming and cut off press to incorporate his design requirements and then made 3 clips for all of his glasses. He attached them to his glasses with heat shrink tubing. It was perfect. He solved his problem and it looked nice. He no longer had to worry about his glasses falling out of his shirt pocket!