Not sanding, but smoothing

It is and you have :-)

Mary

In article , Skipweasel writes

Yup, commonly known as the mk2 wheel but well done all the same :-)

Available commercially in various grades:

It wasn't, but he may have. Thanks Skipweasel.

Yes, I designed a layout for our very small caravan and thought I'd invented the wheel.

Then I saw the smallest Eriba :-(

Still, it's good to know that someone else thinks the idea is so good that it's used commercially :-)

Mary

Ain't that annoying. I got to the Dyson cyclone vacuum cleaner when I was about ten. Bum.

In the days of graph paper I once had a pile of experimental data to analyse and I tried (and failed utterly) to write a programme on a PDP-8 to manipulate and re-scale the various arrays and plot them out on an analogue plotter. When I first saw Lotus 1-2-3 I realised I should have tried harder......

It does work the other way sometimes, there was a small scale British windsurfer maker that was approached by the lawyers of some big American outfit. Apparently in the seventies they had patented the concept of the universal joint at the base of the mast that is fundamental to how the whole thing works and they claim royalties off all the other manufacturers. They were pushing for a cut from mister small brit but he politely said no, they sued and he demonstrated prior art (notebooks, sketches and models) indicating that _he_ had invented it in the fifties when he was a snapper. It didn't blow their patent completely but I think he made a bit out of licensing and broke their monopoly :-)