Grabosaurus
Inspiration can come from the strangest places. For retired oil industry electrical engineer Graham Renny it emerged from the back of a horse.
The 70-year-old was in his kitchen leaning against the Aga watching his wife Susan (who describes herself as ‘usefully old’) in the yard of their Herefordshire farmhouse, picking up horse droppings.
Watching his 67-year-old wife hunched over equine unmentionables gave Graham an idea for a universal grabbing tool. Not a variation on one of those litter retrieving sticks with jaws, but a scissor-action mechanical device capable of picking up anything from a twig to garden rubbish or horse droppings. Showing a flair for merciless puns, he called it the Grab-O-Saurus, and given its connection with the occupants of stables, his creation was launched at the Badminton Horse Trials.
Susan, a one time press agency writer and industrial journalist, is rather proud of her husband’s creation and her unlikely contribution to it, not least because it frees her from the tyranny of buckets of water, shovels and back breaking work involved with mucking out their horses -although she’s keen to promote the device as a general helpmate.
It uses two identically sized ‘paddle’ grabs, one with a toothed end, and the length of the handles effectively means pressure exerted by the person using a Grab-O-Saurus is increased three fold at its business end. Good news for someone with rheumatism, or a relatively weak grip. Likewise is not having to haul items from the floor using the spine as the main point of leverage.
“You have to stand above the waste matter and grab it from above like an eagle’s claw,” said Susan, making the process of muck raking sound rather poetic. She added that prototypes were tested out on various members of her family, aged between nine and 90, to prove its user-friendly credentials.
To get the Grab-O-Saurus into production, Graham had to make his way through the complex process of patenting it (and claims the patent he’s secured is a world first), then obtaining a variety of development grants, which helped pay for the thoroughly costly process of getting plastic mouldings made. Help came from a wide variety of sources, including Coventry University, which put the Rennys in touch with a West Midlands-based manufacturer called MPC Plastics. Advice came from the couple’s two adult sons, are a business analyst and a marketeer.
‘We’ve been incredibly lucky,’ said Susan Renny, despite having to conduct her Saga interview using a mobile phone, because a tractor had demolished a telegraph pole taking the phone line to her home. Their plans to launch a Grab-O-Saurus website had already been stymied by Broadband problems. Such are the pitfalls of life as a rural entrepreneur.
Initially the couple intend marketing the Grab-O-Saurus as an accessory for stables, but are talking with garden centres about selling it to a less specialist audience with a horticultural inclination, who don’t want to be bent double to continue enjoying it.