The customer was involved long term in the production of wood based modular furniture for the education industry.
During Covid, he was approached to make cubicles that had a demountable or portable element to them which would have proved difficult to achieve with wood.
He didn’t have a design or mechanical engineering background and approached several extrusion companies for support, none was forthcoming. Then he contacted us.
We arranged a visit and sat down to explore his vision, and he came up with some very rudimentary sketches as seen here.
We can up with a couple of initial ideas and sent some sketches which over a period evolved into a simple system utilising four extrusions two reversible with some bead options for different glazing unit sizes.
With these we were able to approach gasket manufacturers to establish the availability of standard ones which we could then modify the gasket grooves to accommodate. This would ensure tooling was kept a minimum.
We then 3D printed some samples which gave us a tactile feel and sense of scale plus the opportunity to check fits with their mating parts and gaskets – we do prefer wire eroded samples as they have the edge in accuracy.
At this point we were confident the product would do everything the brief we generated together with the customer required. Extrusion tooling is now underway.
Often, we are praised for the technical support we bring to a project which really sets us apart these days.
Backed up by 45 plus CNC’s, in house plastic injection moulding, state of the art powder coat over 200 staff across four sites in a private company we really are the first choice for machined and finished aluminium extrusions and components.
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