Mechanical Product Design & Fabrication

1995 - In school at Red Rocks I became an avid mountain biker, I rode Dinosaur Ridge a lot. I also frequently completed a lot of mountain bike related work for my school projects. Most projects required us to develop our own design solutions. Some required reverse engineering of an existing consumer product or part currently on the market. For these we had to use calipers and gauges to study and measure actual products shape, form and dimensions, turn it into a 3D solid CAD model then detail it with GD&T data. I was also involved in an actual NASA design program where I had to design a hydraulic lift/lower table transporter to take large delicate scientific instrument clusters from labs and move them through a facility and up into shuttle compartments.

At the time I was initially working in Autocad for DOS (before windows).  We had 3-1/4 floppy drives that held something like 1.4 megs of data. When I finished the program I was into windows NT with Acad12 I believe. I also had just started to have some access to 3D Studio, Pro-E, Solid Works, etc. Below is an elevated chain stay frame of my design and a Rock Shox fork and Spin carbon mag wheels I did based on reverse engineering products. Now I could model all this in a couple hours, back then it took weeks. This is the only school image I have on hand but I know I have a large portfolio bag somewhere of many more product "CAD's".

In the summer of 1995 I worked at Pangaea Engineering, a company which built mountain bike frames and other products as well as a lot of product R&D. I believe the parts in Christopher Reeves were designed by Tom the owner. At times I would be on the computer detailing some part and he would be sitting there working out a 3 legal pad page calculation by hand on some finite element analysis for a customer who had hired him to design and engineer something. The best part of the projects I worked on that summer were in the shop helping make bike frames. I learned about designing frame jigs and different frame geometry, etc. I was hoping to eventually be able to build some of my many full suspension bike designs I was doing in school. In the images below we are threading a bottom bracket, honing a head tube and running control cables.

Over the next several years I worked for a number of companies on multiple projects as an independant contractor, which seemed to be the norm. Companies would bring designers onto projects but often only as full time on site contractors.

B-Ten Systems (Automation)

I was hired at B-Ten as a mechanical designer while still in school. I focused on industrial automation equipment; basic robotics design. I worked under a project engineer who had the total big picture vision of the machine or product that needed to be built. I was assigned design duties on specific sub-assemblies for that product. For one project I designed gripping mechanisms and arms for a Saginaw steering housing assembly line. Another project I was given full design over airbag folding production line stations for GM. I'd design the core in the computer and often found myself out in the shop mocking up quick rough prototypes to test my ideas. I'd then take that information back to my computer designs.

(gonna look for my dwg's)

The things I really liked about B-Ten as well as Pangaea were: the projects were interesting and challenging and I got to split my time between design work on the computer and doing some hands on fabrication or assembly of those designs out in the shop. It was fun seeing something I designed on the PC get built, come together and fully function out in the shop. I continued at B-ten for awhile after school until I got a more art centric job as a Lightwave3D artist and video editor. 

Unique Mobility (EV's)

I worked at UM on an electric vehicle project. My interest there was in eventually doing stylistic form designs and related body design work, but they did not do much of that there. Bodywork they did do was primarily for conversion EV's and was pure function not artistic form. Most of my time was spent on electric motors and gearing. I found out Tom, who I'd work for at Pangaea had worked there as an engineer in the past, he had invented a patent that was still being used at UM. Kinda cool. I remember him telling me was bummed because they were making a lot of money off his idea and he got only a small bonus.

Timberline Automation

More mechanical designs and lots of straight drafting with this one.

Aegis Designs (Practical Scale Modeling and 3D Design)

Aegis was cool, I worked there the summer of 96 doing 3D mechanical design work creating machines, a commercial architectural building renovation project as well as practical model-making which was my favorite part. The owner Bud was an old school practical model miniature maker who had moved into "the new era" of CAD modeling but still had some practical modeling accounts. My main practical modeling work was done on a Navy ship project that was needed as a show piece in a high ranking Navy officers building. 

Here's an early video of me fabricating this ship model: