Recently, I've been moving forward with the development of the bike kit, experimenting with different materials and how they would affect the overall feel, durability and usability of the product. Whatever material is used, it will have to fit specific criteria: 1. Robust 2. Aesthetic 3. Easy to manufacture 4. Easy usability, e.g. cleaning, fixing, installing etc. The first material I've decided to explore is plastic. Plastic would be a great way of keeping manufacturing costs down for this product. Tech can be quite costly, so if the outer shell was made from high-end materials too, it would push the price up to and run the risk of being unaffordable for the average consumer. Certain plastics, if manufactured correctly, can be extremely robust and reliable. This kit will most likely be manufactured out of ABS, similarly to games console controllers, and injection moulded. Injection moulding plastic comes with many positives, from greater detail, low manufacture costs and most importantly, enhanced strength. To test out how the plastic would look on the bike kit, I took to fusion 360 to produce some renders:
Personally, I feel that plastic suits this product well and coupled with cheaper manufacture and enhanced strength, and it seems like it might be the ideal material for it. As well as this, injection moulding comes with very few negatives, but there are still a few. Due to specific moulds being made, manufacturing can incur higher costs at the beginning, but these will come down throughout the rest of production. Also, when starting out, there can be a few design restrictions with injection moulding, but nothing that should affect this particular shape. Overall I'm leaning towards using plastic and injection moulding, but I'm not ruling using metal for the casing. Moving forward, I'll research the positives/negatives of using metal and then render a few models to see how it works aesthetically for the casing. That's all for today's blog, Thanks!
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