Proof Oil & Gas · industrial maintenance
Solve it physically, not with software
60 bins sorted by the next day · zero code
The problem
Storage had become unusable.
A workshop store had accumulated mixed threaded rods, hard to tell apart quickly by size and material. Finding the right part took a disproportionate amount of time.
The governing constraint
The real need wasn't storage — it was identification.
The knot wasn't storing the parts, but identifying, at a glance, objects that were physically very similar — without adding a heavy procedure for the operators.
The approach
Solve the information problem with physics.
The reflex would have been to digitise: a database, labels, scanning. I did the opposite. I designed a purely mechanical plywood sorting system that discriminates the parts directly by their geometry — cut and built on the spot.
No software, no procedure: the object itself carries the answer.
The result
Anonymised illustration of a real intervention. Identifying details deliberately omitted.