Ingenious Tile Laying Tools
from Good Thinking (418 articles)
Click image to enlarge
Image Gallery ( 13 images )May 26, 2005 ExacTile and GuessLess are two ingenious new inventions that make tiling much easier and advanced tiling far more accessible to the Do-It-Yourself marketplace. Both products reduce tile wastage, significantly cut the time required in laying tiles and enable far more complex patterns to be layed. The Intellectual Property on both tools is being offered for sale by Portugeuse innovation company Bdi.
A Portugeuse IP company is offering patents and licenses on some new tiling tools that significantly simplify the process of tiling for both DIYers and professionals.BDi is a Portuguese-based Design, Imagineering and IP Protection partnership specialising in bringing ideas and invention to the marketplace.
BDi works with entrepreneurs to develop workable IP and Designs, then collaborates with organizations such as CENTIMFE - a Portuguese rapid prototyping facility - to have them prototyped for presentation to business angels and investors at OPEN - the new business incubator that has been built alongside CENTIMFE in Marinha Grande, Portugal.
The partnership’s aim is to establish a foundation, appropriately named Grande Design, which will fund ideas and help innovators to evolve their concepts into products, protect them with IP and take them to market. In doing this, Grande Design will earn a percentage from sales, which will fund the foundation and provide the means to support future innovation at no cost to the innovator - only a small percentage of sales of successful products.
To launch the scheme, BDi is currently offering IP for sale on some of its launch products, and licensing on one patent that covers many ranges of tools and devices. The company has further products in pre-IP state, and more in the pipeline. Two of the products being offered are named ExacTile and GuessLess.
ExacTile
ExacTile is a hand tool born out of a desire to give confidence to DIY tilers and to remove the frustration caused using tile spacers, those irritating plastic crosses that purport to help the relative positioning of tiles.
BDi discovered that spacers cause many problems, from poor tile bonding and water seepage, to damage caused when trying to remove them after use. Many people simply don’t remove them, which makes the water seepage problem even worse. Professional tilers don’t use spacers - they use wedges.
BDi has developed a tile tool that works like a wedge, and actually achieves what spacers claim to do, but with many additional features and none of the drawbacks. ExacTile is a modular tile locating and pattern creating tool that not only achieves the objectives of improving tile bond and reduces the hassle when laying tile, it also saves time by allowing multiple laying per each use of the tool.
Gallery Images
Share this article
