The Stack Master development story continues with Industrial Design, Product Design, Virtual Testing, Prototyping, Prototype Testing and Prototype Redesigns (we like to call them enhancements). If you are new to the story, check out our past posts:

Development Project Introduction

New Product Research

Feasibility Analysis, Customer Needs and Design Tools

You will be caught up quickly and enjoy this post.

Industrial Design

The preliminary design was based off our competive and market needs, customer needs, and our designer’s creativity.  After presenting the concepts to the CEO of PaperPro, we decided on a product direction.  We created several variations of the direction and the Uber Fusion Curves won overall.

%catagory The Stack Master, Part 4

Product Design & Virtual Testing

We identified the critical components of the technology that needed to be designed them in Solidworks.

Product design of critical components in Solidworks, CAD.

We knew that we had to scale up the power spring (to 100 pages) without requiring too much more force.  But how much?  Well COSMOS answered that question through our virtual testing.  We created a graph based on those results showing the relationship between thickening the spring and the force of the spring.

Virtual Testing using COSMOS of Solidworks CAD Prototype

Prototyping

With a good understanding of the product design and an updated CAD virtual prototype we sent The Stack Master off to China to be prototyped.  We used clear stereo lithography, a common practice because it allows you to see into the prototype and observe the mechanism working.

Prototype Testing

Testing the Stack Master prototype was quick, informative and effective.  The striker (part that shoots the staple) and other plastic parts needed to be metal didn’t last long, so we commissioned those parts to be made by CNC machining.  This lead to more testing, but it wasn’t long before we had a decent list of required enhancements.

The enhancements should be organized to maximize an effective solution to the cause of the issue. A format that we use is

  1. Part, organize the changes by major part
  2. Issue, what went wrong?
  3. Cause, why did it go wrong?
  4. Resolution, how are we going to fix it?

Sometimes it is easier to answer questions three and four with a graphical illustration.  An example of the visualization that we used is:

Visualization of enhancements to prototype

Once we had a good idea of the issues and ways to improve the prototype, we began the engineering changes.
Prototype Engineering Changes

More to come on our Prototype as we prepare for production and market launch.