Ted Goldstein, P.E., is the Shuriken business development engineer for Atlas Tube.

When Ted Goldstein began his engineering career in New York City, he never imagined he’d be living in Tokyo while inventing a new product that could change—perhaps even revolutionize—an industry that hasn’t changed much in decades, if not longer. But that’s exactly what happened when he invented Shuriken, a new way to bolt hollow structural sections (HSS) without the need for field welding.

Seeing the Need

The story of Shuriken began when Goldstein moved to Tokyo when his wife followed a significant career opportunity there. He had been a structural engineer for about eight years and arrived in a new country that had a well-established engineering community that worked in Japanese, a language he understood little at the time.

With a lot more free time than he was used to, Goldstein was able to carefully examine the steel construction industry in Japan, and noticed that unlike in the United States, its steel buildings used mostly HSS steel for columns.

“Using hollow sections means there’s a lot less tonnage that goes into the building,” he explains. “Whether you’re just concerned about cost or you want to reduce the carbon intensity of construction, using less steel is obviously a good thing.”

Goldstein wondered if he could help replicate the adoption of HSS steel in the United States, but knew it would be difficult. The main problem is that HSS members longer than what can be delivered on a truck must be field-welded, which is too labor-intensive a process to catch on in the United States.

“That was the trigger that got me thinking, ‘Well, is there a way you could get the benefits of the HSS columns, but do it with a bolted connection?’ That led gradually to the development of Shuriken to serve that purpose,” he says.

The Process of Invention

Now that he realized a need and had a goal, the next step was a trial-and-error process to see what might work.

“You start with a lot of bad ideas,” notes Goldstein. “As you eliminate those and gradually figure out what the issues are and how to improve them, it’s just a slow process that gets you to something usable.”

According to Goldstein, his first idea was something a steel fabricator could create in a shop out of steel plate, but it would be very expensive. Then he considered a steel casting, which was a better idea, but still probably too expensive for wide adoption. Eventually, he developed Shuriken.

What Is Shuriken?

Although it may look like a bolt, Goldstein instead describes Shuriken as a one-time-use wrench you can install ahead of time in the shop that lets you bolt from one side in the field. Its major advantage over field welding and other ways to fasten steel from just one side is simplicity.

“You use standard bolts in standard holes, install them with standard tools,” he says. “The equations you use to analyze the connections are the standard equations. It lets people tackle connections they couldn’t do before with bolts, but do it with all of their standard practices and workflows, materials, suppliers, etc. I think it fits very simply into the way people are used to doing things and, of course, does it in a cost-effective way.”

Taking (and Having) the Time

For fellow engineers who come up with good ideas and wonder how they, too, can create something effective and marketable, Goldstein admits he had something most engineers have very little of: time.

“It’s not hard to come up with a good idea, but, so often in life, we have a lot of things that are kind of pressing, whether work or otherwise,” he says. “We think about it and say, ‘Well, that would be neat,’ but then don’t have the opportunity to follow it up. Having the opportunity to really focus on it over a long period was the key.”

So what should all those overly busy engineers do to try and turn their ideas into reality? Goldstein has some advice.

“If you really think it’s a worthwhile idea that should be pursued, it may just be a matter of setting aside an hour a week or 20 minutes a day or whatever you can manage to think about it,” he says. “For me, from initial idea to kind of a workable product was about a year.”

It may take two or three years for those with full-time schedules, but like many things in life, the difficulties can be overcome through persistence.

“Most of that time will be spent with your ‘best idea so far’ being not good enough,” he explains. “It’s only when you get toward the very end where you finally end up with something that’s actually viable as a product. So stick with it.”