 Shopping for new ideas, for maintenance, engineering, communication, equipment, administration, training, safety. If you are, then welcome to the Idea Store. A store whose stock and trade is imagination. Contending with this yet? If you are, you're also changing plow blades. And here's an easy way to do that. Developed by Steve Gardner, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, this blade lifter is a triangular-shaped metal frame with two protruding pins. The pins fit nicely into the bull holes on a plow blade. Here the blade lifter is being used with a shop crane, but it is easily adaptable to a front-end loader or a forklift. Now, from Pennsylvania to Texas, same problem, changing plow blades, and another approach to solving the problem. Jackie Miller of Panhandle, Texas has invented a hydraulically powered plow blade lifter. Easily capable of lifting and transporting the 100-pound plow blades, the unit has a 4-inch by 1-half-inch flat steel base with a center runner of 4 feet by 3-quarter-foot steel. The caster wheels allow blades to be lifted and lowered with the help of a 5-ton hydraulic jack. Mr. Miller explained why he designed the device. I'm just trying to make it easier on the guys. For the construction plans, drop a note to Transportation News, Post Office Box 5064, Austin, Texas, 78763, or call Area Code 512-463-8612. Pennsylvania to Texas, and wherever you are, seems we share the same problems. Problems the idea store can help solve. Here's a safe way to remove and store the frame locking bar pin on an articulated loader. Simply attach a pull chain and the operator can stay seated, move the wheel as needed to loosen the pin. This idea came to the idea store from Russ Huntington, District Equipment Trainer at California DOT. You can contact Russ at Area Code 916-225-3004 or by writing California Department of Transportation, District 2, 1657 Riverside Drive, Post Office Box 2107, Reading, California 96099. Remember the easy greater blade change featured in Idea Store Edition 2? From Rita G. Jones, Louisiana Transportation Research Center via the Transportation Technology Transfer Center of Michigan came this easy to follow checklist for daily maintenance of motor graders. Divided into four parts, pre-start, warm-up, daily operation, and shutdown. The checklist is easy to read and follow. Is it worth it? What did your last motor grader cost? To get a copy of the checklist, contact your state technical transfer center and reference this video presentation. Speaking of common problems, consolidated freightways in their York, Pennsylvania terminal equips their yard buggies with a magnetized bar, a bar that cleans the yard of metal debris as it travels on its normal duties of moving the trailers. Before you say you don't have a big yard that needs to be cleaned, that's not the purpose of showing the idea. The purpose is to ask you to think about what you are doing anyway and see if you can combine your assigned job with another benefit. Like cleaning the yard. Some people call that working smarter. Here's another smart working example. Most local roads in eastern Kentucky were not constructed, they evolved. And these roads usually ran alongside a creek. Heavy rainfall, heavy traffic, and the inevitable shoulder and slope erosion. The common solution, rock filled gabion baskets were undercut by the rushing water, collapsed into the stream causing stream diversion and greater erosion. Pike County, Kentucky uses precast, panelized walls, locally produced, easily installed, and interlocked with steel reinforcing bars and anchor blocks. The walls have proved an effective low cost answer to erosion. Many thanks to Judge Paul Patton of Pike County for his idea and for further information call the Kentucky T-square center for Patsy Anderson at area code 606-257-4509. Patching? Here's a way to save your back and get a better result. Material is dumped directly from the truck into a small box hooked to the front of a motor grader. As the box moves the material is spread evenly. The crew dresses the material and then it is rolled. The box is reloaded and the process begins again. The result is a neat job and an absence of sore backs. The box is the invention of John Garska, Southampton, Massachusetts. John is the former highway superintendent, now retired, but obviously still very active. For plans for the box, write to Meryl Mandel, assistant director, Bay State Roads Program, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Martin Hill 214-F, Amherst, Massachusetts, 01-003, or call area code 413-545-2604. In idea store addition two, we featured the better beaver baffler built to banish the bane for beaver. Tested in Adams County, Pennsylvania, it worked. The beavers moved 200 yards upstream. Still around, but not at our drainage sites. We included this update for all the doubting Thomas's of whom this author was one. Obviously an idea store needs ideas. Here's how to get your idea on the program. Tell us who you are. Better yet, send us a picture. Give us a good description of what your idea is. Show us the where, the locale of the idea is important. Why was the idea done? For reasons of safety, cost benefits, etc. How do you do it? Show us step by step, provide plans, pictures, whatever you think we might need to understand what it is you want us to understand. Send your idea to your technology transfer center for evaluation. Thanks for shopping at the idea store. Until next time, remember an idea never shared is an idea never appreciated.