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Buried in a cabinet, in the back corner of our lab, sat a long-forgotten box placed there after a move.

This box, contained 5 years of prototype catheters. A graveyard of lessons, failures, and hundreds of hours of engineering work.

When I found this box, we were having major motor issues and we were searching for answers.

Our current design, ready to enter validation testing, would bind, torque would spike causing errors and inconsistent performance. In hindsight, we were designing in circles, and spent months chasing symptoms instead of understanding root causes. But at the time, we were doing the best with the resources we had.

Cracking open the box, I was amazed by what I found.

Dozens of catheters with extensive engineering notes attached to them documenting each device’s successes, failures, lessons and recommendations.

Reading through some of the notes, I found one that read: "Excessive friction at 15° bend radius," "Torque spikes beyond acceptable limits," "Abandoned - try flexible coupling approach instead." And guess what? this device had the EXACT same motor configuration as our current design.

We'd literally forgotten our own hard-won lesson and spent months re-learning it.

Twenty minutes with that dusty box saved us months of engineering headaches.

Don’t look at your prototypes as failures. They’re institutional memory in physical form.

Every dead design documented a path that doesn't work, and more importantly, why it doesn't work. The tragedy isn't building prototypes that fail; it's forgetting the lessons they died teaching you.

Next time you're stuck on a tough engineering problem, dig through your old prototypes first. The answer might be gathering dust in a forgotten box.

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