Desk Tidy Project. Design Brief. Design Specification. The products. Researching Materials. Essential Desirable Additional

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1 Function and Performance - The desk tidy should fulfill it main purpose and function of holding a range of stationary securely and in a tidy way. It should be easy to put th stationary tidy and not be over complicated. Materials - It is advisable that the desk tidy should be made from either foamex or polystyrene. I will make my desk tidy from a single piece of foamex as it seams relatively strong and flexes without snapping. Size and weight - The desk tidy must fit onto a work area of 300mm x 100mm x 4mm when folded out. It must also be no larger than an A4 sheet as this is the maximum size the CAM2 Roland ts400 can machine. The desk tidy should also fit onto a desktop easily and be reasonably light weight so it can be moved around easily. Design - The desk to tidy will be designed using CAD on a number of programs including Corel Draw, Solid Edge and 2D design. We will use CAD to design the product because it is much quicker, easier and more efficient. The desk tidy should be designed with no more than 8-10 holes and 4 slots as this is sufficient for the size of the product. The product should also be able to hold a wide range of stationary. The final product should be an accurate reproduction of the final design. Target User - The desk tidy will be aimed at anyone who had a desk or working area that wants to keep their equipment tidy and out the way. Design Brief Desk Tidy Project To improve our immediate working environments when carrying out design tasks it helps if a designer can organize equipment into some form of container to keep the work space neat and free of clutter. Design and manufacture a simple stationary holder suitable for a desktop. Design Specification As you can see to the left, I have made a list of specification points which must be met in order of the groups they are in. I have colour coded each point as essential, desirable and additional so that I know which points are the most important. Essential Desirable Additional Appearance - The desk tidy must have an appealing and interesting design to look at and must hold stationary in clever ways to make it more visually pleasing. Deadline - The desk tidy product should take no more than 2-3 weeks including all of the folder work to be completed and the final design manufactured to a high standard. Manufacture - The final product will be manufactured on a Roland CAM2 Ts400 Router and be bent into shape using a strip heater. CAM is very important in manufacturing a product like this especially when you have to make the product it batches as it means you can duplicate the same product over and over again. The products 160mm 145mm 8mm 30mm Here are the dimensions for an average biro pen and ruler. These dimensions will be important when designing the desk tidy especially when cutting holes and slots. 8mm Production Type - The product will be a one off model but could be made in batches on a large scale if needed as the design could be manufactured many times again quickly and efficiently using CAM. Cost - The desk tidy will be very cheap to design and manufacture using CAD/CAM. Foamex is also quite a cheap material in sheet form compared to acrylic. Life Expectancy - A desk tidy made of a plastic like foamex which is just holding stationary still on a desk will have a very long life expectancy. Foamex is also quite flexible so it won t snap if bent a little bit. The desk tidy should last at least a couple of years. Maintenance - The desk tidy will be very easy to maintain as it has a smooth surface so will just need cleaning from dust and dirt every couple of weeks. Safety - It is advisable that the desk tidy had no sharp edges or corners that the user could cut themselves on when using the product. Researching Materials There are two possible materials to choose from for the manufacture of the desk tidy. These are High Impact Polystyrene or PVC Foamex. High Impact Polystyrene This is a stiff thermoplastic which becomes soft a pliable when heated with a strip heater. It comes in a range of colours and has a shiny surface. It can also be welded, glued, injection moulded, blow moulded and vacuum formed. It is reasonably lightweight and won t snap easily of dropped or handled with. It can be cut using a CAMM2 Router. PVC Foamex PVC Foam is an economic, versatile and lightweight material. It has a fine cell structure with a smooth matt silk finish and high impact resistance. It will not rot or swell like timber. It can be easily cut, sawn or drilled making it a popular material for signs and other products. This material can be machined on the CAMM2 router and I think is the most suitable for this product.

2 Initial Ideas I wanted to design a stationery holder around the theme of a logo as these are easily recognizable and make the product stand out from similar products on the market. On this page I have designed some initial ideas from my initial sketches that are more accurate and give you an indication to what the product will start to look like. Here is one idea I came up with. It is based on the famous surf logo of Al Merrick. It is unusual in the fact that the plastic would be folded sideways. There would be no holes or slots but the stationary would be held by three identical hexagons which make up the logo. This is a unique design that I think is interesting to look at and also aesthetically pleasing. The only issue I can see with this design is actually manufacturing and fabricating it. Although it wouldn t need machining at all, this product would need fifteen identical folds with some of the a lot of the folds going back on each other. This would be very difficult to do on a normal strip heater. Here is another one of my initial ideas based on the very popular Quiksilver logo. This design would have steps going up one side and then a quiksilver logo cut out of the other with a small dish to hold smaller items of stationery. This design looks quite attractive as it has many curves and angles which make it appealing to the user. This idea could be easily cut out on a CAMM2 router and easily bent using a strip heater. The only drawback I can see is that the top of the quiksilver part of the design which connects to the top is on held on by about a 1cm piece of plastic which would weaken the design severely maybe causing it to break. Here is one of my favourite initial ideas. Again it involves the Quiksilver logo theme but instead of the logo being cut out, the whole design is bent and shaped to look like the logo when looked at side on. This design would have plenty of room to incorporate a range of stationery through holes and slots. This design is aesthetically pleasing while being fully functional. It would be very easy to cut out on the CAMM2 router and relatively easy to bend and fold using a stip heater as most of the folds are in the same direction and follow each other around the shape. This is the design that I will go on to develop and hopefully manufacture in the near future.

3 Development Here is my development page. It will show how I took my favourite initial design and through testing and reviewing the design at each stage it will show how the design begins to develop and expand until I come up with a suitable final idea to put forward to the manufacturing stage. Most of my development was done on the high end 2d Program Solid edge as this shows you simple clear 3d models which are very accurate indications of what models would look like. As you can see I have taken my favourite initial idea and have shown where the holes and slots will be located. This 3D design doesn t look as good visually as I thought it would because the triangle bit on the side of the design isn t symmetrical which makes it look out of place. Apart from this there many holes and slots which make its good functionally. I will continue to develop the design to make it more aesthetically appealing. As you can see I have placed the triangle part of the logo to the center of the design making it symmetrical and more visually pleasing to the idea. But to do this I have had to split the top part of the design into two which takes away some of the design functionality as one of the wholes now must be removed. However, its still has six holes and a ruler slot making it quite functional. I will continue trying to improve and develop this part of the design. This design is has a few improvements to the last in the fact the top is not split down the middle which allows for two extra holes. The triangle part will now fold up from the bottom. The ruler slot has also been moves as when the ruler is placed in this position it would be more stable and wouldn t keep falling over. On closer inspection, the holes on top of the design may be two close to the edge so one of them may have to be taken away. Here is my most developed design so far. It uses the triangle part which folds up from the bottom. I took out one whole from the top as the holes were too close to the edge of the plastic which would weaken the design. I now have two ruler slots, one for a large ruler, one for a smaller ruler. It has seven holes altogether plus a small cut out for maybe a pair of scissors making it very functional. Overall I think this design is the most functional and probably the best visually as well. I flattened the developed model in solid edge and converted it to a flat drawing. This drawing could then be printed on the A3 printer and cut out by hand. I then created a full size paper model of what the final design might look like to check if everything would work as planned for the manufacture of the product using foamex. This is important because if the model didn t work at this stage then it wouldn t have worked at the next stage which means I won t come across any unexpected problems saving time, and if was produced commercially also money. Here is a photograph of the full size paper model.

4 Finalising Idea - 2D Design This page is about how the design will be cut out from the solid sheet of plastic into the desired shape for the design to be folded. This is the stage where all of the wholes, slots and other features will be cut out into the correct shape. First we have to create the design as a 2d sheet in 2d design. First I flattened my 3d design in Solid edge. I then turned this flattened design into a 2d drawing. As a template for the actual size and shape of the desk tidy. Fold Sequence Next I imported the flattened 2d drawing from solid edge into 2d design. I made any necessary changes and had to trace over some of the lines as they were separated out in solid edge. After this, I contoured the outside line by with a 1mm gap because the cutting tool has a diameter of 2mm. This is the red line. I contoured the inside of the lines in the same way with a 1mm gap. These are green. Finally I setup the size of the cutting bed and page setup to match the CAMM2 router. I noticed I could fit two of my designs onto one sheet of plastic. This could save plastic and also time and money As you can see I needed to create a fold sequence to determine how the design will fold and if it will work when it comes to bending the plastic on the strip heater. This is an important step in the fabrication of the desk tidy because there is only about a 20mm gap between the edge of the strip heater and the actual wire. This means if a right angle must fold over the edge it would have to be more than 20mm wide. I determined the fold sequence by testing it on a small paper model. I wrote the fold sequence down and followed it when bending the plastic with the strip heater,

5 Manufacturing / Fabricating It is important to plan the manufacturing process of the project to insure mistakes are not made and so I know what to do when it actually comes to fabricating the final product. On this page I will go through the two processes we will need to manufacture and fabricate the desk tidy. CAMM2 TS-400 Strip Heater Plastics such as foamex that I will use to create my desk tidy can be formed in different ways. One of the most popular methods of shaping plastic materials like foamex is to bend it on a strip heater. An example of a strip heater is shown below. A heating element extends along the length of the strip heater and gives off intense heat when it is turned on. To use the strip heater you first turn it on by the switch and set it to the LOW heat setting to stop the plastic burning. First you must mark out all of your lines accurately using a tri-square and felt tip marker so you do not damage the foamex. I used a printed off net of the final design to mark out my lines accurately. Next, I located my first line and put this directly above the wire. You have to leave for around secs so that the plastic becomes bendy. The softer the plastic is the better is will bend. I bent the plastic to the correct angle using a full size print out of the side view of my final design and held it in place until it cooled and became solid again. I then repeated this process following the correct fold sequence. I had to make a small jig out of pieces of wood for some of the bends to stop the holes from distorting as they were a bit too close too the edge. Here is a screen shot of the machine setup for the CAMM2 TS-400 router. It shows all the settings needed for the machine to cut out the specified design. I designed the final idea in solid edge, this was then converted to drawing which could be exported into 2d Design. Within 2d design I needed to change the colour of lines and then specify which colour lines were to be cut in the machine setup shown. Within this machine setup you can see there are two different colours for each cut. The red for te outside cuts and the green for the inside. Both cuts are set to a depth of 3.2mm as the actual plastic which I measured came to a thickness of 3.4mm. Having the tool to cut at 3.2mm will ensure that it doesn t cut into the bed of the machine while still cutting the plastic just enough to cut out the shapes required. As you can see from the second screen shot, I set up the speed of the machine to cut at a speed of 20mm/s on the horizontal axis and 5mm/s on the vertical axis. These are the optimum speeds for cutting PVC Foamex. If the speed was too fast the cuts wouldn t be as clean and if it was too slow it would take too long costing more time and money. Test Models Before fabricating the final design I used a cut off test piece of plastic the same length as the actual piece of plastic I would be using. I drew out the lines using the template I printed off using a felt tip marker. I then used the strip heater to bend all the necessary lines and to get a feel for how the strip heater worked. After I had completed the test model shown below I was ready to do the final design. This test model was an important stage because if anything went wrong with this model I would know this when it came to the final model. If had missed this stage out and something went wrong with the final design I would then have to cut out the whole design again on the CAMM2 costing time and money.

6 Final Idea Here I have shown my final idea in solid edge as a 3d model and a 2d flattened out version. I have also included some photos of the final design so that you can compare them to the 3d CAD models that they were manufactured around. In my opinion the actual model looks identical to the 3d CAD model created in solid edge. Overall I am pleased with how the final product came out and how it looks as a whole. The stationery that I intended the product to hold is held in place securely as expected and the overall functionality of the product is good. Eventually after re-bending some of the folds next to the holes with the use of a small jig I managed to get the bend right without distorting the holes too much. From the side view the product looks like the quiksilver logo as intended and the angles that make up the curved part of the logo are all to the correct measurements from the use of a small printed template. I feel that I have met most of the essential specification points and have met the deadline for the project. Improvements If I was going to do the desk tidy project again there are a couple of things I would have done differently. Firstly when using the strip heater I would have left the plastic on a bit longer until it became more softer and more pliable. I feel that I rushed this part of the project a bit and maybe could have improved the overall finish of the desk tidy by taking my time more. Also the holes started to distort when I bent the line nearest to the holes. To overcome this I would have made the lines further away from the holes during the design stages of the project. Also, If I had more time to do the project I would have maybe used some of the engraving capabilities of the CAMM2 TS-400 router as I could have engraved a logo or something else onto one of the faces of the product as shown in the picture opposite. I think this would have made the product even more appealing to look at and overall make the design more interesting and unique.