Pencil Plus CAD Equals Better Design

Comfort First: The Komfort Kruiser, designed by Ove Industry Design, consists of three pieces of EPS foam that eliminates the need for injection molding.

Despite the wealth of sophisticated software available, pencil-and-paper drafting lives. And for some projects, it's the best choice for initial design. So say the engineers at Ove Industrial Design. They used old-fashioned pencil and paper to do initial design of improvements for a kids' car seat.

A local manufacturer, Jupiter Industries (www.jupiterindustries.com/komfortkruiser.html), collaborated with Ove Industrial Design to improve Jupiter's existing child car booster seats. "Since they don't have infinite resources for development, they have to be very frugal," says Tim Poupore, President of Ove Industrial Design. "They had an existing product—renowned in the industry for comfort, but expensive and not attractive—so they wanted to make a better product by lowering the costs and offering a more attractive car seat."

The end product, the Komfort Kruiser, is made up of three parts of EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam: the seat base, back rest, and head rest. The three parts are made from aluminum tools, rather than injection molding, which cut down on costs. The seats are heavily regulated and classified by weights and sizes of children. Intended for 3- to 10-year-old children weighing 33 to 100 lbs and measuring 37 to 60 inches tall, the Komfort Kruiser features a seat-belt positioning system that adjusts the shoulder belt to the most effective position. Taking side-impact collision into account, the seat's head rest is designed with protruding pockets in its corners and a reclining mechanism that protects the head from side impact and also supports it, should it fall back or to the side.

So how did the design of a child safety product with such exact ergonomic styling (it took children's dimensions into account) and strict regulations (it had to be approved by the National Highway Safety Transportation) come about by means of pencil-and-paper drafting? "That is the best way to get your idea across to clients," says Ove Industrial Designer Stacey Gay. "It's much quicker for problem solving and for generating ideas. Moving to the computer is the next stage...to allow you to take your data and put it into a CAD model to build around reality."

Ove designers moved to that next stage by developing the Komfort Kruiser in Delcam PowerSHAPE. "Others didn't have the ease of use that surface modeling software had, and solid modeling didn't have the surface modeling capabilities," explained Charles Goertz, senior industrial designer and the third member of the Ove team.

For a product like the Komfort Kruiser, the designers were able to use surfacing tools like the curve tool to redraw the sketched curves in 3D. The dynamic sectioning tool allowed them to view the thickness of material, while other PowerSHAPE features such as draft surfaces enable smooth operation in the manufacturing end of the process. Fortunately, the Ove design team was already familiar with Delcam PowerSHAPE, though they described the software as efficient and intuitive to learn.

Ready, Set, Draw: Ove Industrial Design starts all its design processes--including the Komfort Kruiser--with original sketches done in pencil before transferring them to CAD.

Because Jupiter Industries had its own manufacturing business, the Ove designers were not involved with the final design aspects, such as adding the material. "The material itself was a challenge," says Gay. "What we molded had to be safe, comfortable, and cost efficient (for both molding and sewing)."

Ove says it designed a much-improved booster seat with a bicycle helmet-grade interior core and pivoting back. The new seat design ultimately saved costs and won recognition as a grade A from the authors of the Baby Bargains Book. And the tools that went into that design fortunately fit the needs of the designers perfectly. "CAD software is a huge investment for a company our size," says Poupore. "A lot of organic modelers are intended for animation and not for production work. Delcam is a bit of a dark horse in the U.S. It has been very good for us."