2007: Camping Shower Head
CAMPING SHOWER HEAD
Executive on Demand Position:
TBA
Project Outline:
TBA
Project Outcome:
In the early May of 2007 I was invited by a close friend to join him on a fishing trip in a remote North Ontario area. The outside temperature hovered 0° C during the day and much colder after sunset. The ice had already melted off the lake and it was still cold enough that we would get snow during the night allowing for a few millimeters to accumulate by morning. We lived in a small cabin with a centrally located wood burning stove for heat and cooking. Since there wasn’t any running water for drinking, cooking and brushing our teeth we had to retrieve it from the lake as needed. An outhouse located a few hundred meters away from the cabin took care of our most basic human needs.
Spending a week in a remote area with little comforts from home is enjoyable and can be a challenge. It is under these conditions that I personally witnessed man’s ability to adapt itself to the environment and deliver some of the basic hygienic comforts it lives with in a modern society. When living in close quarters with a group of men without a shower to wash oneself, the air in the cabin can be somewhat ripe. The group of people I met on this trip have been religiously been meeting at this time annually for more than 20 years. To make the environment as comfortable as possible they have had to be creative to adapt the environment around them to be as comfortable as possible.
The most interesting idea was that one of the participants had created an easy-to-use portable shower system to allow everybody the ability to clean oneself from head to toe . The guy had created adapter a cork plug to fit inside a 2 liter soda bottle with salt shaker head attached to it. Using it was very simple. Whenever someone wanted to clean oneself, they filled the soda bottle with water that was always kept warm on the hot stove (mixed with fresh cold water to regulate the temperature) and squeezed the cork and salt shaker adapter tightly into the top of the bottle. First you washed your hair by squeezing the bottle in your hair over a wash basin and then applied the shampoo. To rinse you once again sprayed water from the bottle on your head to remove the suds from your hair. To bathe the rest of your body you stepped into the wash basin and did the same to wash the other parts of your body. A two liter soda bottle of water was sufficient to provide a thorough washing.
This bottle adapter provided a simple solution to keeping oneself clean when the basic comforts of home are not easily accessible. I approached the creator of this simple adapter and discussed with him commercializing this idea. He had thought about taking the idea to market but did not have a clue about how to get a proper adapter engineered, manufactured and taken to market. The commercial design would dispense with the cork insert type of mounting as this would sometime allow the adapter to drop out whenever the bottle was squeezed to hard. We agreed to work together and that because of the my procurement and manufacturing activity in Asia, I could easily use these resources to take a raw idea into a real product for commercial distribution.
Working with an China based plastic company several designs were created to create a product that economical to make and easily understood by the end user when it is commercialized. A production injection mould was made using a threaded mount to capitalize on the existing bottle cap thread as a means of properly securing the spray shower head. Production units were tested and adjusted several times over a three month period to ensure that the water spray was even when the bottle was squeezed and that the adapter did not leak at the mount area. The production version was field tested by the original creator the following spring while he was on he and his friends met for their annual fishing trip. Samples were provided and when I met with him upon his return, everyone using the shower adapter were very pleased with its simplicity and functionality of the portable shower system.
As a result of the successful development, manufacturing and field testing of the soda bottle shower head adapter, a commercialization plan was developed by the inventor and a further request was made to develop a retail clamshell with four colour art to package the product. This was also designed and manufactured by as China based plastic company.