bepps

Installment number six of what I do at work, as promised, talks about the arm construction.

At first I tried making the arms look like the legs of an office chair. I just basically drew something up real quick to get the mold done as quick as possible but Howard thought it was too complex. Which it was, I didn't spend much time on it, I just tossed something that I felt would work on the screen and said "Here, this will work, let's make it".
It looked like this.



I thought "Well whatever, he wants me to spend some time designing a quality part, I'll design a quality part." The arm I drew up was nothing short of a masterpiece of design and engineering. It used virtually no plastic compared to the ribbed design and in the FEA it tested twice the strength I needed it to be. It was pretty much a perfect design. Howards response: "It looks like something that came off a car. We want something that looks like a piece of furniture." Oooooo that pissed me off.

Here's a picture of the one he thought looked like an automotive part.


This is what you the customer would see though.


Here's video of how it would have flexed had it been built.


When he said that I thought to myself "Well no shit. Automotive parts look the way they do because it's the cheapest most efficient way to make a part perform its function." But whatever, it's his name we're stamping on the side of this thing not mine so I redesigned it with esthetics being the primary design objective. After Juan got a full part out of the mold he looked at it and handed it to me and said "That's a really nice part." He's pretty much Oscar the Grouch usually. All he ever says is "This molds a piece of shit! This part is a piece of shit! This is a piece of shit! You're a piece of shit!". This part is the only time I've ever heard him say that anything was nice.

Here it is inside the mold.

Hot half. (Not all of the geometry that I cut into it is shown on this model.)


Ejector half. (Or as Juan calls it the Ehyectordr half.)


Here's a picture of all of the parts after they come out of the mold. There's the arm, The cap that snaps onto the big end (so it doesn't hole-saw it's way through the spa with repeated openings (funny note, Howard didn't think that was necessary)), and the little square doodads on the outside are additional parts that I threw in that mold. They are little covers for the straps that go on the lids. Someone broke off the one on the right. Sucks cause I moved the strap covers into its own mold base so no longer will I ever get this tree with all 4 parts on it again.



Tomorrow I'll talk more about the straps and the overall spa direction.