Bryce "Ben" Bénat

My current job is Research and Develpment Engineer for Hoerbiger (Compression Technology). I design and test new products and new materials, using test rigs which we design and build ourselves. This one on the right measures wear and friction of the new tribological materials used to seal compressors. The animation shows the mechanism of a double acting compressor. At Hoerbiger, we don't make compressors: we make them work!

Those wings are huge ... And I helped build them! I worked for 6 months at British Aerospace Airbus in Chester, UK. My Poject was to organise the logistic of the tolling used to build the A320's wings. The wings are built on 12 huge jigs wich remain fixed and the different teams rotate around the jigs, having to use very specialized tooling to assemble the structure and fit the parts.

At University, I focused my projects on Bio-Mechanics. My final year project was to build a 3D model of a human hip from CT scans, with the Laboratory of Anatomy of Clermont Ferrand, France. This was used by surgeons to design the perfect hip prosthetics for each patient. I also built similar models of the spine for burst fracture and spinal cord damage simulation , with Leeds University and St James Hospital.

This is our mountain-bike tandem. We cycled across the Rif in Morocco (photo with Karen and a view of Chefchaouen lost in the mountains) and from Krabi (south of Phuket) to Bangkok in Thailand (bottom photo). The bike is a Burley, and I have made major modifications myself on about every sigle part, with particular attention to the forks, the wheels and the brakes, to make it the ultimate allround (off/on road, and racing/touring) tandem!