Projects

Trans American Auto Project

G2 Axle nad a new Dana 44 Axle housing design but didn’t have enough resources to design and model the center section casting. Since we have a lot of experience designing complex cast and forged parts, this project was a good fit for us. So they had a laundry list of good ideas and we went to town. We took their list and added a couple of our own ideas to it. Like adding a unique adjuster spanner nut system that eliminateds  the need…. read more

Nikolas Weinstein Studio

Team: Paul Hammerstrom (PHD), Eric Lindsley (PHD), Nikolas Weinstein, Adam Kisor (NWS), Bill Sistek (NWS). What started off as an “FEA on a small injection molded part” turned into highly technical materials selection and structural design projects. I had no idea who Nikolas Weinstein was, so I started researching and quickly found out why his glass sculptures required so much engineering. His work is an intersection of art, architecture, and engineering…. read more

FOX Racing Spring Compressor Project

The team for this project consisted of Dennis Wootten (PHD), Josh Yablon (PHD), John Bullock (FOX), Dan Watkins (FOX) and Kerrick King (Areias Systems). We have had a long term relationship with FOX. We cut our teeth doing R&D projects for them. A couple years ago we were approached to help out on the Manufacturing side. Since then we have been doing a lot of manufacturing tooling and fixture design for them. One of the more challenging projects was to design a spring compressor to install springs on their powersports shocks. The challenge centered around the number of different size shocks, and safety.

Fox designs and manufactures many different size shock absorbers for off-road vehicles. With so many different length shocks and spring diameters, the machine had to be very versatile. In addition, compressing springs of this size generates a lot of force, so this had to be extremely safe…. read more

Alter Cycles Project

Alter cycles approached us about helping them with their new bike concept. Mark Groehndaghl, a bike industry legend who designed the famous slingshot bike, had a new frame concept based on his original slingshot bike. This time, he wanted the down tube to BE the spring instead of adding an actual spring in place of the downtube. They had a rideable concept, however, they needed it refined. They needed it modeled in CAD …. read more

Donnelly Sports

Donnelly Sports was looking for someone to model tires in 3D so that they could bring their tire designs to the next level. After looking at some of their current designs, I knew that we would have to bring our modeling A game to their projects. Some of their designs are so incredibly intricate. We had to devise a robust, repeatable method in order to efficiently model the tires in 3D. The method we came up with, cut down on regeneration time by 10 times over our initial method. This was key, because some of the more intricate patterns take a lot of time to regenerate after making changes.

Since we are avid bicyclists ourselves, we are able to understand the performance aspects of the tread patterns and offer some of our own insights into the tire design. We really like working with Donnelly SPorts, but we do get a little nervous when the say, “We have this crazy idea for a new tire!”… read more

XVI Technologies

Brad Siskavich owner of xVI Technologies (http://xvitech.com/thermal.html) approached us to help them optimize cooling of solar reciever tiles. The receiver tile assemblies have 3 main functions. One is to properly constrain the solar cells in space around a graphite core that is being heated to 3000K. The second function is to actually convert the energy being emitted from the graphite core into electricity. The third is to cool the photovoltaic cells doing the energy conversion.. read more