The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

I generally use sketchup, 'cuz it's free and easy
The concept is simple tbh, doesn't really require a pic but I'll send one as I've just spent half an hour making a model before my brain told me it's not really that complicated

Cheers

Dean

Sketchup is great, I use it all the time for quick jobs.

Get a non disclosure contract drawn up and signed before speaking to anyone.

And here was me thinking the patent office was impartial - you live and learn, thanks Christel.

The patent office is impartial.... The lawyers who submit the patents sometimes aren't!

I use my own NDA for those customers that don't trust my word,

We have a whole bunch of people that work on nothing else but patents be carefull if you go down that route. A none disclosure agreement might be your starting point.

PATENTS : Tiresome costly and involves lawyers...
The advantage if you have a truly innovative and new product and concept that is worthy you can protect it and ensure that you have the "legal" basis to reap the benefits.
The disadvantages besides sneaky people "changing" it just enough to bypass patents - finding out about infringements - then enforcing your rights.
God forbid that happens because the same lawyers that charged you for the patents will charge others money to bypass / avoid it.

PRODUCT
Design, prototyping, testing, packaging and manaufacturing will take 10 times longer than you estimate.

SELLING
Great products are great - finding, communicating and convincing the target market to take money out of their pockets is much harder than you would think.

HUMAN BEINGS
Have a wonderful way of persisting in using inferior products and methods to save a few pennies, or to avoid admitting that they are wrong or just because they did it this way for years

Ask me the C2R process has been very enlightening!

That sums it up well Tim.

It might be worth looking at Design registration at the patent office, It's reasonably easy to do yourself and not expensive, just taking a few photos really. Design registration covers how this look, not how they work.

Also, filing a patent application is easy and cheap, you can do it yourself for something like £70, even if you have no intention of going on to a full patent and spending wads of money (you'll never get it back on a shooting product in this country)

A patent application lasts a year, you will be able to say "patent applied" on your product. Competitors will have no idea what you have written in your patent application for 12 months ( A patent application could be titled "improvement to rifle sighting systems")

The Patent office has a website with quite a bit of help if you want to apply on your own.

Thanks for the replies everyone.
I'll send over a quick plan to ovenpaa, I reckon he's trustworthy enough, then we'll take it from there. It may already exist as a product, fingers crossed I'm a genius :-)