Designers pin hopes on their Acrow prop alternative

Having experienced the pain of using traditional Acrows props himself on a renovation project, Grove Design managing director Austin Owens challenged his colleagues to come up with a solution that would transform the time-consuming process to make it safe, quick and easy to adjust the supports using a standard impact driver.

After months of consultation and numerous prototypes, the answer involved replacing the threaded collar with the patented J-strut gear collar, which can be wound up and down to adjust the support height using the J-strut pinion gear.

“Despite their global success, setting up temporary steel supports is still time consuming, labour intensive and fraught with the risk of injury,” said Will Helme, one of the designers on the project.

“Spinning the collar to the right height requires physical effort and when threads are caked in dirt, rust and cement it takes significantly longer and can feel a hundred times harder. We found that out for ourselves and often innovation comes from trying to solve a problem in everyday life.”

He continued: “J-strut removes the need for manual adjustment of the collar, avoiding the frustrations that come with repeatedly winding and adjusting. All the effort to overcome friction is done by the impact driver, reducing operator fatigue, and minimising the chance of injury from human error.

“Temporary support often needs to be deployed and removed quickly to facilitate a smooth build process. Our system enables rapid deployment by greatly reducing the time taken to spin the collar to the correct height. If a support is up against a wall and the operator can only turn the collar half a turn at a time, an adjustment that would usually take minutes to complete manually can be achieved with J-strut in a matter of seconds.”

The challenge for the design team now is getting to market. One option is to license the design patents to a manufacturer; another is going into production and retailing direct to the end user, or via rental and leasing companies.

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