Magnetic Attraction

Frustrated by an age-old problem faced by drivers using ratchet straps to secure loads, one trucker decided to come up with his own solution and has made a living from it

- Dan Parton

Often in life, it is the simple solutions that turn out to be the best ones – and for Dan Harrison, that has turned out to be the case. But when he had his lightbulb moment, little did he think that it would lead to him jacking in his driving job to focus full-time on turning his invention into a business.

Annoyance factor

Dan’s problem when loading will be familiar to many drivers: when putting ratchet straps onto a load, often the strap hook drops from the bed of an HGV or trailer while tightening the ratchet on the opposite side of the load. “It means you have to go all the way back round the truck and roll the strap back up again to start the process again,” he says. “I’ve had that happen four times in a row before.”

And when you’re a driver in a hurry, as Dan often was, it can get time-consuming and stressful.

“I noticed it wasn’t just me who was having this issue, so I looked into solving the problem.”

Dan’s solution is very simple: “The side rails of lorries are made of steel, and basically I thought the best way to keep a hook in place was to put a magnet on a strap.” And that is what he did: the Harrison Strap, made from a hook and loop strap (like Velcro) and plastic, fits onto a ratchet strap and, using two powerful neodymium magnets, keeps the hook in place while the driver goes round the other side of the trailer. It is such a simple idea that Dan did a worldwide patent search to check there wasn’t something else like it already in production. There wasn’t.

“So I thought I’d go for it, rather than someone else coming up with a similar idea and me sitting at home thinking, ‘I wish I had pursued it’.”