Think Out of the Toolbox
This September, Discovery Channel brings you a brand new series – Howe & Howe Tech, revolving around a pair of twin brothers who put a twist to extreme vehicle design and fabrication. With sheer determination and perserverance, these brothers want to show the world what it takes to think out of the toolbox. Follow Mike and Geoff and their team of loyal shop crew as they stretch their family business into unexplored realms of creativity with resilience and a never-say-die attitude. Known in the US as “Wright Brothers of the Military”, the Howe brothers have a repertoire for building ingenious new machineries. From high-speed military tanks to supercharged subterranean rovers, the twins push innovation limits in each episode. Below is an interview transcript with the “turbo-charged” duo.
HOWE & HOWE TECH premieres on Discovery Channel every Thursday at 2300 hrs (SIN/HK), starting September 2. Encores the following Thursdays at 1100 hrs, Fridays at 1500 hrs and Sundays at 1900 hrs.
1. How did you land yourselves into what you’re doing today?
Geoff:
We started our endeavours back in 2001. Our journey started, actually, when we
were younger. I guess, ever since we can remember, we’ve been building vehicles or
building systems robots. It’s funny. I went to college, my major was biology and
Mike’s was biology, and somehow we came together and we’ve always been
designing and fabricating different machines basically to fill niches that we saw were
not being filled in the world. And most of our niches and our vehicles that we build
are to save lives or help save lives, whether it be in the military or in industrial
commercial sectors, fire-fighting rigs or unmanned ground vehicles, what we call
UGVs.
The world now has multiple unmanned aerial vehicles, so we were one of the
first to develop unmanned ground vehicle systems back in the early 2000s. And
certainly we did the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge where we had to race across
the desert with unmanned ground vehicle system. We were the only ones in that
competition out of 179 teams ranging from MIT to Carnegie Mellon to the best
in the world; we were the only ones to run it in a tracked vehicle. That vehicle is
called Ripsaw. You’ll see this vehicle in the shows coming up for the first season
of Howe & Howe Tech, you’ll see Ripsaw, as well as other vehicles like the Badger.
So this is stuff that we have been building for really our whole lives. We are 36
now, so we’re still young. We’re pushing the outer limits of what can be done in
technology now. And basically surrounding ourselves with the best small team
special forces operation type fabrication, inventors, engineers and coming up with
vehicles and concepts that are pushing the bounds and have never been done
before.
2. Why the obsession with monster machines?
Geoff:
All I can say is the builds get bigger, better, more severe. There is a machine called
Rolling Thunder. It’s twice the size of a normal Ripsaw. And it’s designed for the
mash truck circuit. It has 3,000 horsepower and is designed for entertainment.
3. How are you breathing new life into military equipment and such?
Geoff:
I guess we really don’t breathe new life into existing military equipment. Instead we
invent new equipment. It’s much easier to start from scratch than to take an existing
piece and modify. I think that’s why we are successful in our endeavors. Maybe
most try and modify existing systems, while we throw it out and start over.
4. What are your thoughts on technology, and how has it helped you in your pursuits?
Geoff:
Technology is very nice and certainly helps us gain an edge over yesteryear
inventors. But technology can also complicate and slow the entire process down. A
happy medium must be found between high technology and getting it done. We
also call that “Paralysis Throw Analysis.” Without enough analysis, the project may
not work and fail; but with too much analysis, the project will never get done. Most
inventors who do not make it have a problem in this area. A classically schooled
engineer is taught in most cases to over-analyse their programs. This causes the stall
effect and the projects usually end up on the floor half done or just performed in
paper form. The reason usually is caused by the lack of the schools’ teaching
initiative. You can have all the analysis or “technology” in the world but without a
lesson in initiative (of applying the technology), it will never get done. You must set
a personal deadline and “pull the trigger.” “Pull the trigger” is short for “start the
fabrication of the design.” It can be anything at all – cut the first part, bolt the first
bolt – something, anything but it must be done and setting a deadline for this can be
an easy way to solve the problem of stalling. Technology is very nice to have but
what’s more important than technology is initiative.
5. What’s been the most outrageous machine you’ve ever conceived (publicised or otherwise)?
Geoff:
The most amazing machine we’ve built to date is Ripsaw MS-2. That is in this
season. Really every time we take it out, every time we test these machines, we’re
building them now on full scale. Every time we work with them, it’s just an amazing
sight to see a machine so robust and it does what it does – unmanned operation,
manned operation, autonomous operation – it blows me away. It’s the machine
moving really on its own accord and you can get used to that. That’s probably my
favourite machine. We have more machines that we’re building to date that we
won’t get into now, but they’re just crazy.
The Badger is an incredible piece of artwork as well. The Badger is in season one
and it has to do with paramilitary S.W.A.T. application. And this is why this is
important. When you have police officers put their lives on the line every day for
the safety of its citizens, it goes to the heart, and they really ask nothing. They don’t
get paid much. They ask nothing in return and this is our give-back to them. The
Badger is an incredible machine. It’s in the Guinness Book of World’s Record as the
smallest all terrain tank.
6. What is the ultimate machine you’d build?
Mike:
Does somebody have an unlimited budget because I’d love to talk to them because
we have so many things to build!
Geoff:
What we do is produce things that the world has never seen. That’s our goal in life
and that’s really where we’re going. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and better
and better. Some people refer to us as the Wright brothers of the 21st century.
Others have referred to us as the Howard Hughes of the 21st century and maybe
that’s who we are. I don’t know, but I know our goals are to build bigger, better,
bigger and better.
We have concepts on the drawing board. As a matter of fact, we have a design to
solve the energy crisis. It has to be proofed out.
7. How did your childhoods and backgrounds form the basis of your interest in your field? And what about being twins help or hinder you in your projects?
Mike:
We’ve been asked this question before. It’s hard to determine when we actually
started. When my brother said it started back before we could remember it, it’s real,
it’s true. We were building, taking our bikes apart at age of six and trying to develop
cable pole robotic arms. We were taking toasters apart to alarm clocks. Everything
that was electrical in our house at that time had been taken apart and tried to be
figured out. So it’s was very, very young that we just started to try to understand
physics, electronics and mechanics. By taking things apart and putting them back
together and doing new different ways of putting them together, we just started to
acquire knowledge in basic physics and mechanics.
Being a twin has absolutely helped out. In fact, I don’t think I’d be where I am today
without my brother, Geoff. It’s a team. Having a team mentality, having trust in
your team member beyond on any trust that you can imagine is such an advantage
in business because what we do is we “divide and conquer”. So Geoff will take a
certain avenue of business, whether it be logistics or for the business end and I will
take the engineering part and the electrical and/or the mechanical end. And we
come to meet in the middle, but we come and meet in the middle with full faith into
each other, full trust in each other. And that has absolutely allowed us to push the
envelopes of small business, push the envelopes of innovation. So yes, it’s
absolutely a fact that we couldn’t have done it without each other.
Geoff:
I just want to add a quick bit on that. Mike and I grew up, I can probably say, as very
poor American children. Our mother was single when we were 7 years old, raising
three children on a teacher’s salary back in the ‘70s. I don’t know how she did it. I
really don’t. Mike and I didn’t have toys for birthdays. We didn’t have much of
anything, but food on the table, which thank you to my mother for that, as well as
my father.
So we grew up having to trust each other as two male twins and we didn’t have
much. This is probably the driving, if you look in the psychology of it, the driving
force of it, when we were younger, we didn’t have anything. So we’d have school.
We’d have our friends. They’d have the latest and greatest sled or this, that or the
other. We didn’t have really anything, so we were forced to develop and build what
we could at the time.
Geoff:
Having a twin, he’s going to tell me what I need to hear moreover than I want to
hear. And that’s critically important because I come up with an idea, “Hey, Mike, is
this a great idea?” Mike is going to think about it and he’s going to give me a true,
honest sound board to bounce off and say, “You know what, Geoff, that’s a great
idea,” or “That’s not really a good idea.” Where I wouldn’t see it normally or maybe
an individual without a twin wouldn’t see that.
Mike:
Geoff, that was a great answer. Great, man.
Geoff:
I worked on it all by myself.
8. How do you think your machines will help save the world some day?
Geoff:
Our cause is humanity. And so humanity knows no borders. We believe just
because we’re in the United States, all these machines we build – barring military
programs – is really for the greater good of humanity. If it wasn’t, then I guess why
would we be here and doing what we’re doing on the program right now with the
wheelchair operation and getting paraplegic and handicapped individuals mobile
again to go and explore the wilderness? Because we take for granted walking and
being able to explore and do these things where they can’t, so we have a program
that we’re developing right now to get these individuals with a machine that we’re
building called the Rip Chair to get them out there. Being philanthropic is really
important to us because at the end of the day, what difference does it make if we
make a super duper can opener?
Now that being said, there are some programs that are just simply designed for fun.
The Mini-Ripsaw is just simply designed for fun, but we try to manage our program
to have the greater good, certainly world changing or at least trying to do what we
can for the world. And we do exports to other countries and try to, I guess, help in
those avenues.
Mike:
Yes, let me talk about the Rip Chair for a second. It’s in season two. There are
people out there that have fought for many causes and some lose their freedom,
their freedom to walk, their freedom to take their sons out fishing and hunting. So
no matter how they got in that wheelchair, whether they were born that way, or if
they got into a car accident or if they’re a veteran, there’s a real sense of giving back.
But what can we do to give freedom back to people who have lost their freedom.
And you don’t really understand until you see somebody in a wheelchair and you’ve
been with them all day or a week and you see that they have no freedom. Their
freedom is limited to somebody pushing them around, somebody putting their
pants on, somebody doing everything for them. So can you develop a machine that
substitutes that and gives them back a little of freedom?
9. What obstacles have you faced or do you face in convincing the world of your machinery fantasies?
Geoff:
Definitely negative energy.
A lot of people when we were younger, say we’re dreamers. And if you listen to
those people, what we call the naysayers, you’ll never get anything done. Mike
and I use that negative energy and turn it into positive energy and produce.
Now those naysayers aren’t quite nay-saying as much as they used to because we’re
developing these machines and one of the machines we want to build is a desert
racer that has never been done before in the scale that we want to do it.
10. Describe yourselves in three words.
Mike:
For me, I think it would be energetic, fun, and thoughtful.
Geoff:
God fearing and more… you’re my twin. Come on, come up with something.
Mike:
I think, deliberate. You’re very deliberate in what you do and you push forward with
an idea. So that’s what I would say.
Geoff:
There you go, yes.
