bepps

Installment number five of what I do at work.

The spa right now has an MSRP of $2700. $1000 more than what it originally was. In fact the original price point we were looking to hit when we started on the project was $1499. After howard added in all the doodads to make it flashier and make what he saw as a better product the price just moved up to where it is now. I thought the spa was pretty good to begin with. Here's an image of the final original design that I drew up in CAD.


That image doesn't show the rigid covers and the awesome lid opening system. That actually took me a while to come up with. As simple as it is and as simple as it looks, just thinking up how to do it actually took me almost two weeks. It's very easy to look at a simple design and say "Well yea, what the hell else would you do?" but no one had ever done anything that did what we wanted to do before. The way Howard explained it was it was to lift up, come back, rotate back, lower down, and then get tucked up against the side of the spa.

I tried to envision a linkage setup that would do all that. All that was coming to mind was something like a motorcycle suspension which was far too complex for Howard. You gotta keep things very simple for him or he can't understand it and says it won't work. I printed the spa out and the lid out and tried to make up some linkage systems and none of them worked until I used just a single simple plain ol' arm. After I drew it up in the cad and printed out a little flip book for howard to see it operate he says "Well hell, I said to make it both simple and effective but I never dreamed of anything being this simple!" Neither did I. And with further refinements it went from being a bent bar that was attached to the bottom to being tiny little injection molded plastic arms that looked really good. Here's a few pictures of it in the 3D modeler.





Here it is on the spa itself in this next image. I want that spa. It's the spa that all of the testing for new potential features was done on. There's holes drilled all over it and each hole tells a story considerably longer than what I've written here today. It's the spa that's in the front office of the shop here that we show to potential sales guys who want to carry our model. We have the showroom up in Adelanto, but Roxanne is the one who shows the spas off up there. Down here that spa there is shown off by those who designed it. There's a lot of history in that lil spa right there and I want it. I need to call up Jeff and tell him to ship the latest spa incarnation down so we can load that dude up in my truck.


You have to look close to see it in this one cause of the lighting.


Next installment I'll tell ya all about the arms themselves.