Home Base

Well, finally it's posted. It's been finished for over a month, but I'm just getting around to posting the finished Home Base.

I'm actually lucky I even have them now, they were stolen from the Architecture of Objects show and were not returned until a good friend from the architecture school wrote a rather strongly worded stern email to all of the architecture school and someone anonymously dropped it off. I still owe my friend a beer for that one.

I made 4 of them, in the range of colors seen above. They went over very well in critique and everyone was very positive about what I had made. Shaun (my professor) seemed to like them very much as well. I think the best comment I received on Home Base was (paraphrasing) "These are strong enough as a product that they don't really need heavy marketing to get people to buy them. I would like one in my apartment. The blue one specifically."

I was very happy that I got the pieces powder-coated, there nothing like a professional paint job. I'm getting pretty good at making my models, but the guys at Cramer Tech know their stuff.

I decided not to exhibit the black Home Base in the show because of a little paint blemish and the wood piece for it was a little uneven so I pulled it. The three remaining did well I thought.

These are the custom magnetic note holders I made. I took steel rod, hollowed it out on the lathe and made a pocket for a neodymium magnet to sit inside. Each end was then capped with a rubber bumper to protect the steel frame of Home Base. I was quite proud of these little buggers, simple but because of the strength of the magnets they hold well.

These are the custom fasteners I made to hang Home Base. Similar in form to the magnets, these are a polished steel jacket over a press fit aluminum threaded insert. A hanger screw (coarse wood screw on one side, fine metal threads on the other side) was then threaded in and Loctite was used to fasten them in place. The bumpers were the final caps to the fasteners.

I presented Home Base with these as the hangers and people had no particular issues with them and they held heavier keys well. For the final public show however I used a different fastener that Shaun showed me that was wider in diameter and had a groove in it to hold the keys. Similar idea, but a bit nicer finish so I went ahead and substituted them.

I'll follow this up soon with pictures of the public Architecture of Objects show, it was pretty nice, if a bit packed with objects. The class made many many nice objects so I think Shaun had a hard time picking what got in. I was quite happy to get my clocks and Home Base in, 2 projects out of 4 in the final show isn't bad!

Thanks for reading!

She comes in colors ev'rywhere!

Just got my metal pieces back from powder coating, they look very nice. I'm quite happy I decided to spend the money on having them professionally painted. I picked a cobalt blue and a semi-gloss white and stuck with the matte black on the third piece.

The cobalt blue with an unfinished wood piece hung on it. The magnets go in the holes and it will then be covered in a birch veneer and shellacked. Besides finishing the wood pieces up, I'm working on making some custom mounting pieces out of aluminum stock and hanger screws so that the Home Base sits flush with the wall. Trip to the hardware store and Alro metals for parts to fabricate the fasteners out of and then I'll be ready to glue the metal to the wood! Busy few days ahead!

Thanks for reading.

Paint Testing

Today for Home Base I started cutting out the metal. So far so good, simple straight cuts for the metal. I bought 18 gauge steel yesterday, not to thick, not to thin, but thick enough to hold it's own weight up.

Next up is bending the U bend on the rollers, luckily we have a small sheet bender with a 2 1/4" diameter. Perfect for the bend I'm looking to create.

I'm also doing some painting tests with some spray paints I have left over from the clock. Flat black, gloss black and flat white. I'm planning on powder coating the metal, but I wanted to test just in case the powder coating ends up being to expensive or takes to long. Deadlines and budgets after all.

I'm still not sure what colors to try, partly I wanted to see a white and black on the steel. I'm thinking painting one black (just need to decided gloss or flat), another flat white, and then a different color. I'm thinking a flat secondary color (maybe a yellow or cyan). Really something to throw some color on the wall.

Testing, Testing.

Thanks for reading.

Home Base Sketch Model

Well, it's final project time in Architecture of Objects. We were supposed to do a furniture piece, but I really felt interested in a wall storage product and Shaun let me explore it.

So, I'm working on a storage solution for keys and mail. The product will go beside the front door and would magnetically hold keys on it's front and hold the mail in a curve created by the supporting metal structure. It's sort of a J, placed on the wall.

Below is a sketch model, affixed to my fridge because I didn't want to nail the sketch model to my wall. The keys pull the cardboard down a bit, so the front is not vertical like the final metal model will be.

The cardboard here is going to be powder-coated steel and the foam core will be routed out fin-ply covered in a birch veneer and stained with a light shellack.

The curve in the metal provides a nice 8" x 5" x 2" slot for storing mail, and is deep and wide enough to support magazines, newspapers and small packages. Above the mail slot there is a large 10" tall by 7" wide metal area perfect for notes and reminders held by small magnets. The smooth Birch front is the perfect place to store your house keys with the embedded bank of neodymium super magnets holding them securely with out the tangle of hooks. Simply hold your keys up to the wood and let go, the magnets will do the rest.

I've gone through a few different names for my product, I feel that this is really one of the first products I've worked on that needs a name that describes what it does. My possible list includes,

Home Organizer (all ready used)

Key Base

Wall Organizer

Key Home

Wall Store (all ready used)

Home Base

Home Store

Wall Base

Store

Home Store

Right now Home Base is the front runner. I was thinking the packaging could read,

HOME BASE

Your Families Mail, Key and Message Board Base

Or something like that. It needs work.

I'm starting routing right now, initial routing tests were mildly successful. I've made the product as a whole 1" wider, providing more room on the metal for messages and more room on the wood for keys. It also provides a wider place for the mail to sit so that it dosen't easily fall out if it's not centered in the slot.

Routing the rough pass.

Routing the finish pass.

After the finish pass. I'll take this to the table saw and cut off the excess stock.

So that's were I am currently, on Thursday I'll be spending the afternoon routing out the new wider pieces. In the mean time, cutting out the metal and bending it. Then it needs to be taken to the powder-coater for finishing. Step by step.

I'm making multiples (I'm thinking 3) since they are quite simple and with a smaller object multiples really read nicely.

Thanks for reading.

Magnetic Chair (in process)

My magnetic chair is coming along full swing. I've had some hiccups of course, like the bending plywood not bending nearly as tightly as I was lead to believe it would and instead snapping. But over all, I'm ok with the bending ply not working, it was really not a very nice material to look at when layered and the whole reason I wanted to use layered veneers was for the edge quality of layered veneers.

Instead I am CNC machining the legs (well, the entire chair) out of a nice plywood from Fingerlee Lumber here in Ann Arbor (a great local lumberyard, highly recommended). I've got time on the CNC machine tomorrow morning and I'm quite excited, it will be my first time on these machines. I'm so thankful that Michigan has the world class Taubman Architecture college in the same building at the Art & Design school. Because of their huge budget and big money donors (namely the schools name sake, Taubman), they have an impressive amount of tech that I'm able to get my hands on. I love it and kinda wish the Architecture school had a design program as well. Design in the hands of artists is withering out sadly.

The CNC routers. Photo from Julian Bleecker's Flickr.

The other snafu was the magnets I had ordered online turned out to be from a company in Hong Kong. In my haste to order them at the end of a class period, I neglected to check where they were shipping from. So for the chair that I wanted to keep the sourcing local, I end up buying product from Hong Kong. The stupid things aren't even here yet. I ended up buying some neodymium magnets from Stadium Hardware here in Ann Arbor, again highly recommended.

I've worked out where all the magnets lay and will be embedded and I am quite happy with how it should come all together. Below are some screen shots from Rhino of my model and cut files. (I decided not to take the time now and render them nicely, so screen shots it is for now!)

The cut file. I'm cutting 3/4" plywood and sandwiching the pieces to create the size needed. The circles are various drill holes for the friction and magnetic held wooden rods that will hold the chair together while in its 'up' position or the magnet holes for the carrying 'down' mode.

The chair up on the left and the collapsed carrying state on the right. The hole in the back of the seat acts as a handle for carrying the chair.

Another view.

I'll post some process pictures of the CNC and the resulting pieces tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

All New Semester, All New Problems, All New Issues

Well, I had three glorious weeks at home, but all good things must come down, or all objects must end? Who the hell knows? Either way classes start on Wednesday and I'm a bit nervous. This is my first semester taking pure product design classes (Designer Bootcamp, Sketching Ideas, Dimensional Languages). I'm a bit intimidated by my profs, I think because I don't know them really that well at all yet, and it's the first time I've heard about my profs before the class starts.

I am excited however for classes. I switched schools to take product design classes. I'm looking forward to them. I'm decidedly not looking forward to CFC III. Worst. Series of classes. Ever.

Wish me luck! Thanks for reading!

Give me some wine so I may say something witty!

One (1) "Party" Faucet

Plus

One (1) Blender

Plus

One (1) Bag of Wine


Equals

Camouflage For The Kitchen

(details and pictures to follow soon)

ID Website

John Marshall recently turned me on to this industrial design website, Core77. I love it and just spent 2 hours looking at it. Best use of time ever.

I'm really looking forward to starting classes and getting working!

Thanks for reading!

Huzzahh!!!

Sweet Zombie Jesus! Look what I found!

yourmoneyyourmoney.blogspot.com

I'm going to be rich! Or not.

Anywho....What I really discovered was...
....a concept sketch I did a few years ago while still stuck in engineering for a iPod dock and stereo on my hard drive. It was for the only class I ever enjoyed in mechanical engineering, a manufacturing and design class. We actually team designed these iPod docks and then prototyped them using SolidWorks (an engineering design program, that I'll probably still use in industrial design, it's really powerful). Then of course, we actually used CNC machines to make them. It was really interesting, but a pain at the same time. Lots and lots of time was poured into this iPod stereo dock. And we didn't even use my (two) designs. My group members (the idiots) settled on the easiest one to make.

If I remember correctly, the dock was supposed to be compact for easy transport and above all, cool looking, not boxy like so many are. We settled on one that looked like a football cut point to point. Heck, we even painted the stupid thing to look like a football. It was a terrible design. We got a C and were lucky to get it actually. The abomination of good design is below.

Fugly iPod Dock

My concept sketch was included in the full proposal for manufacturing paper we created (47 pages!). I luckily still had a copy on my hard drive. I'm thinking it would be interesting to expand on this design as I am interested in consumer product design. Anyway, the image of my sketch is below.


The whole design was a shell with the speakers which, when closed, encased the ipod, the dock, and the remote. But when you opened it by sliding the two shells apart form each other 'till they stopped and then rotating them out and open, you had an interesting to look at fully functional portable iPod stereo. You could even leave the iPod on the dock, close the shell and there were little slots on each side for the iPod to slide into, thus storing and protecting your design for travel! God, it was amazing. The jerks thought it would be to hard to make. Well yeah, it would have been tough, but we would have an A if we succeeded and an amazing prototype. But no. We went with the football design from Captain Jock Itch (he was a lacrosse player).

My other design, the iBall, as I dubbed it.


As you can see, both my designs were certainly pretty cool looking and couldn't be further from boxy.

I think I'll make a fine industrial designer someday.

Anyway, thanks for reading, feel free to comment.

Holy Moley! 3 posts in one day! I am SUPER POSTING MAN! Cower in fear as you read my posts!

WizWheelz Industrial Design Work

Over the summer of '07 I worked as a Design Intern/Assembler/Jack of All Trades (that was more or less my title) for WizWheelz (home of the TerraTrike), a recumbent trike company. It's like a lawn chair with wheels and a Ferrari chassis. Check out the WizWheelz link for pictures of these comfortable speed machines.

Anyway, I did frame design and reworks for them and also had a hand in designing some accessories for the line of trikes. I specifically worked on a headrest design that I helped with in the final prototyping stages and a seat riser which was given to me in the initial stages of development. This one was my baby, it was handed to me as a rough idea and prototype and it was my job to make design it to look good and function flawlessly.

The headrest is currently finished and back from Taiwan in full production and you can now buy something that I had a hand in crafting. Below is one of my technical drawings and a picture of the finished product.

My technical drawings.
The finished product.

For the headrest my main input was the adjustably of the model. Initial drawings and prototypes only had the telescoping rods for height and neck adjustment. When I got my hands on it and applied the companies tag line of having the most adjustable trike on the market to the headrest. The rotating joints you see behind the pad and on the lower telescoping arm are my doing. With these joints the customer is able to specifically set how they want the pad to rest on their neck. I was very proud of this contribution. If your into triking and have a TerraTrike you can purchase one here, the WizWheelz accessories page, it's at the top. (There is however, no commission in it for me. I'm making no money if you click there...or am I? Nope, I'm not.)

My baby, the seat riser, is still in Taiwan waiting for final production.

The Main Unit

The Lower Seat Stays

The seat riser was super rough when it landed in my lap. We had a rough prototype that we had tested and structurally liked but it needed some help with it's looks and finer details. It was very boxy when I got it and I gave it smoother, rounded lines and designed the attachment system. I also designed the lower seat stays from the ground up with torsion resistance in mind because of the extra length they would have to cover than the normal lower seat stays. I can't wait for this one to get back from Taiwan and see the final product. I'll post it when it comes in!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave comments.