A 26th birthday spent almost entirely in a bathroom in Birmingham, it was time for a re-think.
No, not your typical morning-after story; Tom Keen was testing the water at the 2018 Kitchen and Bathroom show in the NEC with FlushBrush, a detachable, self-cleaning toilet brush. The head of the brush lives inside a cradle hooked onto the rim of the toilet, while the handle is stored on a stand attached to the bathroom wall. To use, the handle is simply pushed into the head to clean the bowl, with a button releasing the head back into the cradle, where magnets ensure smooth placement. A rubber-coated aluminium strip maintains the cradle’s positioning and the toilet’s flush routinely washes over the brush head, and thus, a potentially cleaner solution is presented.
Tom’s motivation to invent this product came when he moved into a at where the only item left behind was a used toilet brush - "and when I say used, it has been very improperly used," Tom kindly divulges. FlushBrush has come some way since then. Birmingham was the first time the concept had been shown to anybody who wasn't a) a friend or b) an employee at Idea Reality, the product design studio Tom collaborated with. Just days after patent documentation was led, Tom sought some valuable feedback on his early prototype.
“People were quite right in saying it was too big and had too many corners, [but] there were a good number of people who were encouraging: ‘you’ve got the good seed of an idea, but this concept you’re displaying needs some improvement,’” Tom recalls.
Up to this point, Tom and the Idea Reality team had combined their respective vision and expertise to agree on a design that would utilise a push- t system with tactile feedback, rather than a screw action, to attach handle to head. Powder bed fusion technology had been harnessed to prototype the handle, stand and cradle, while the PolyJet process was selected to print the brush head in a silicone- like rubber material.
While the size of the product was of concern for trade show attendees last year – the handle is now standard size, while the cradle is no bigger than toilet freshener blocks currently on the market – there were some more nuanced issues to solve in the design. Namely, the push-fit join mechanism was reliant on there being enough force generated to connect the handle and head, but the wishbone arms that had been integrated into the cradle design were initially too delicate to take such force. At this stage, Idea Reality were outsourcing their 3D printing needs, which meant prototypes couldn’t be turned around in a day. But, fortunately for Tom, his aerospace engineer friend saw the FlushBrush project as a chance to test his newly purchased Rhino modelling software. Having modelled different stress outputs, he determined the current wishbone arms might be at risk of snapping if too much force was applied. IdeaReality then used this information to make adjustments to the design, increasing the reliability before another prototype order was placed.
A few months on, Tom was given the nod to present his product on Dragon’s Den, a BBC TV show where inventors and entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to a panel of investors, but with just a month’s notice. Lucky, then, that Idea Reality was now running an Ultimaker S5 in-house. Without it, the company’s Design Director James Lamb is sure, “we wouldn’t have been able to iterate and perfect the product before the filming deadline.”
“Once Idea Reality got their 3D printer in, we were able to knock out a number of different parts, that was really helpful,” Tom adds. “Before that, we were relying a lot on theory. It made a big difference once they bought their own 3D printer.”
Ten prototypes were printed with the S5 (though the PolyJet process was still used for the brush head), and the design refined, in those four weeks. A number of the investors on the show expressed an interest in the product, with Tom eventually accepting an offer of £50,000. Next, a crowdfunding campaign is to be set up to take pre-orders and gauge the market. The plan for Tom then is to make small tweaks and come up with the most one-size-fits-all product he can, to prove the side project that ‘got a bit out of hand’ is justified, and to make sure being consigned to a bathroom in Birmingham was a 26th birthday as well spent as any other.
