bepps

This should be the last installment of what I do at work. Although these entries barely touches on what all I do. I might write up one more rant covering the fan shroud project. That was a big project that, while the outcome of the project was catastrophic, I still was quite pleased with my work on the design. I at least might show some pictures of it, it's a pretty impressive thing to look at. But back to the small square spa project.

Here's the strap covers in action.





It wasn't really meant to be used as an end peice but it does work quite nicely as that as well. We were having some problems with it stress cracking after repeated openings when people would grab onto the strap and pick the lid up by that so we had to change the design a little bit to strengthen it up and redistribute the stress thorughout the plastic. After I changed the design there we started running it out of black plastic rather than the grey. The grey ones we are just using for the end bits of the gasket like you see there.

Oh, that's another thing about this spa. As far as I know we're the only spa maker that uses a gasket for their covers. When you close the lit it's almost a complete seal. While this helps to cut down the power usage from the heater considerably as well as cut down on water waste, the main reason that we have to do that is because the steam vents out the side and in cold weather places such as Iceland and the northern countries or mountain places, the steam condenses on the arms and everything and ices up. When we were making the spas for sundance, early on we had some issues with part distortion and there was a lot of leakage. People were coming outside and seeing these huge ass balls of ice on the sides of their spas. Like big basketball sized ice cubes. It was funny to see. With ours it would have iced up the lid mechanism and they wouldn't have been able to open the lids to access the control pannel and shut it off (with the 110 plug and play model that wouldn't have been an issue, they could have just unplugged it, but with the 220 hard wired conversion they would have had to pop the breaker and what if something else was on that breaker?). So with my spa especially we had to make sure that we have excellent sealing on the lids. Which we do, it's vitrually air tight. If we could make it air tight we would, but of course barrametric pressure changes would blow the thing up as would it if there was a malfuction with the electronics and the heater stayed on.

There's quite a few other really awesome design features of this spa. Such as the preformed insulation that goes around it. I can't really tell you too much about this since we're the only ones who do it, but there's some really fantastic manufacturing methods used here. It saves tons and tons of money, works a shitload better at insulating it, and above all the peices are removable. See, that's something that a lot of people don't really know about their spa. If they get a leak, say one of the jets wasn't installed right or just develops a leak, or worse yet, while you're goin at it in there you or your girl kicks a jet and breaks it right in the heat of passion, well, that's it. The spa is trash. The entire thing, save the motor and electrics. All of the shell and the plumbing, the most expensive parts of the spa are junk. In order to get in and replace that jet they have to dig out all this molded in foam and it's such a pain in the ass and such a painstakingly long process that it's cheaper to just grab another shell of the line than attempt a repair. If there's a leak with my spa we just send a technician out there (read minimum wage Mexican dude with a lil plastic wrench) and he removes one er two panels (that are attached with velcro no less) and pulls out the blocking insulation peice and tightens the jet up. Takes like 5 minutes.

While that is a huge bennifit to the consumer since it only takes a day er so for the spa place they bought it from to send a guy out to tighten the jet up (or replace it, that only takes a few minutes longer) the real reason that we're going that way is because we know how much it costs to pull a spa from the line and send it out. I mean that's a whole damn spa that we're losing there. While we could just say "Sorry bitch, shit happens." and charge the consumer, we're not able to do that yet since this is a really unknown brand and since the spa costs so little to build and therefore buy people are going to say "Pff, that's what you get when you don't buy quality. you buy from a known brand, you get quality service." and pass us off as being a cheap brand.

That, of course, isn't the case at all. One thing I really disliked about this sales direction they were taking with it is they're calling the brand South Pacific Spas. When I hear that name the first thing I think of is Made In China. The small size and the fact that it's the lowest priced spa out there doesn't help things. Especiallywhen you look at the thing and see how awesome it's features are and consider that it's priced lower than anything else you're gonna naturally think this is a Chinese designed and built product and of extremely low quality. But that's not the case. This thing was designed in America by American engineers and built by Americans (well, some of the guys we have in the shop are American hehehehe and, at any rate, they're being managed by Americans).

At first the line was to be called Palms Springs Spas (a few of them at the start of production were sold under that name). This nect picture is the type of logo I was envisioning using. This spa shape is quite early on in the design. The final design looked nothing like that. I'm not sure what I was thinking at that point. But then, I just wanted to come up with a bunch of design ideas so we could discuss them and figure out how best to do it. But with the logo, I really liked that one. Althuogh it was just some font that I downloaded off the internet, I thought that it spoke a lot about this spa. From the get-go I was worried that people might think this was a cheap Asian spa so I wanted something that said "American product" best. And when I think of American products I think about the 1950s. Kitchen products more specifically. I felt that font there kindo summed that all up and was something you'd see on a 1950s product. But Howard went with the South Pacific Spas since he has a thing with Polynesians. He has a shop in Manila soley so that he can go down there and mack down with Filipina girls. Being a multimillionare I'm sure you can imagine he does quite well. He's a funny guy.