Chemistry Stenciling - A Scrapped Project?

[Spenny]

So this was an idea that I came up with a couple months back. I'm an undergraduate chemist and we have to draw a lot of annoying shapes, stuff like this.

I find these shapes annoying, because A) I'm bad at drawing them neatly B) I'm not fast enough & C) they're very repetitive to draw out again and again. I wasn't alone on this, I asked my classmates and they found it very annoying too. Here we go, we have a need.

So from my research I thought there were two avenues that I could go down. A chemistry stencil or a stamp of some sort.

The Stamp
I actually got mocked up and sent to me (see below). Long story short, the stamp didn't meet my expectations. It can only make one shape, one size & was hard to line up properly. I didn't use it personally because it was a pain.

I wasn't impressed
- I couldn't line up the stamp properly
- It only has one size avalible
- Its not versatile enough
- I stopped using it because its annoying
so I've now turned my attention to a stencil.

The Stencils
There a quite a few avalible in the UK. They're actually very good. Laser cut, plastic

But neither of them grab me as much as this one

Features
- Portable (designed to fit in a wallet)
- Metal (premium material)
- packed with information (the back has formulae ect)
- All the right shapes.
Its got everything needed, and then some.

On further inspection, this looks like an amazing productocracy that the creator has made. People are cheering for this product. Five star reviews everywhere.

I thinking about scrapping, I don't know if I can add much more than what the creator has done.

The only thing that doesn't make me buy is that its £30 in total to be shipped to the UK, usually its only £15 in America.
Now I'm thinking about this, I could make them in the UK and take advantage of the price arbitrage, just dont want to be a copy cat.

Maybe I'm missing something here? I'd love to hear some thoughts.

 

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[Stargazer]

How original is it?

It just reminds me off all the metal credit card sized tool kit things that you can get. Which have been around for quite a while. There are hundreds of different styles. Like this.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087JMTNS2/?tag=tff07-21

You'll see they don't cost much at all, less than £10 so maybe they only cost a couple of quid to make.

Go to the Engineering Faculty and they can probably design and knock one up for you as they will more than likely have the kit to do so. Or the DT Faculty if there is one.

Can you put Uni logos on to them to make them different? Get Pearson to throw them in when buying Chemistry text books if you still buy physical textbooks, maybe they are all online now?

As a little project it seems like a fun thing for you to do.

Dan

 

[Spenny]

How original is it?

It just reminds me off all the metal credit card sized tool kit things that you can get. Which have been around for quite a while. There are hundreds of different styles. Like this.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087JMTNS2/?tag=tff07-21

You'll see they don't cost much at all, less than £10 so maybe they only cost a couple of quid to make.

Go to the Engineering Faculty and they can probably design and knock one up for you as they will more than likely have the kit to do so. Or the DT Faculty if there is one.

Can you put Uni logos on to them to make them different? Get Pearson to throw them in when buying Chemistry text books if you still buy physical textbooks, maybe they are all online now?

As a little project it seems like a fun thing for you to do.

Dan

That's some good ideas, Ive actually thought of wacking a logo on it and selling it to the university. To be honest, now youve mentioned Pearson, this could be more of a b2b rather than a b2c model. It could be great.

Thank you for the response, I do really appreciate it!

 

[becks22]

This reminds me of those laminated 3-4 page overview guides that they sell for like every subject in the college bookstore.
Are there any other subjects that have similar issues that could benefit from something similar? Calculus, Physics, Pre-med (and all of the specialties including pharmacy even though that is similar to chemistry, it could be a differentiation)

 

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[Spenny]

This reminds me of those laminated 3-4 page overview guides that they sell for like every subject in the college bookstore.
Are there any other subjects that have similar issues that could benefit from something similar? Calculus, Physics, Pre-med (and all of the specialties including pharmacy even though that is similar to chemistry, it could be a differentiation)

Apologies, was meant to respond to this. Amazing idea, I think this is where you start getting a product range. I could imagine engineers need something like this too.