THEY say necessity is the mother of invention and for one Southern Downs man the old adage has rung true.

With one little invention, Joe Doepel, a mechanical engineer from Allora, made life a lot easier for one of his mates in the construction industry.

"I've come up with a twin- headed hydraulic concrete drill that clips onto the front of a bobcat,” Mr Doepel said.

"The machine is used in construction for drilling starter bar holes into concrete slabs.

"Basically, when you are adding a new concrete slab beside an existing concrete slab, you need to tie the two together, and this is done by drilling holes into the existing slab, in which you place the starter bars which act like a foundation for the new slab.”

Mr Doepel said these holes previously needed to be drilled by hand.

"That usually took a few blokes a few hours,” he said.

"My mate owns Currumbin Concrete Designs and needs to do this task quite often, and I helped him do it a few times and after doing it for long enough we got to thinking there must be an easier way to do it.

"So a thought became an idea, which became a couple of sketches and we got to work on it.”

Mr Doepel said a hydraulics specialist started working out the pressures and flows required for the attachment.

"And I started sourcing the drill bits,” he said.

"We needed then to change the drills from electric motors to hydraulic.”

Mr Doepel said it took about 10 months to get from the original design to a working tool.

"It's still very much in a research and development mode, but it has great potential,” he said.

"There is an air-powered design in use overseas but that requires a very expensive external energy source to operate.

"Ours uses the bobcat's existing hydraulics system.

"It's a pretty specialised piece of machinery so there will definitely be a demand for something like this in the construction industry.”