tutorial & dev

From my tutorial, I took three major points about my design. • Still too thick • Is it durable enough to be sat on when carried in a back pocket? • Why would someone use this product? In order to reduce the thickness, without having to completely re-do the CAD model, i scaled each part by 0.8, then cut and extruded them back to the original height. However, this put my gears very close to the 1.5mm limit of precision outlined by HP in their initial presentation. To add durability, I made sure not to scale the thickness of the tab, and kept this at 2mm. As well as this, I added 1mm to the thickness of the hinge case, as well as added 2mm each side of the pin holes. I don’t know what difference this will make, but I will find out after round 2 of prototyping. In order to add functionality to the product, I looked back at my wallet survey, and found that a fair few people carried multitools in their wallets. Personally, the tools I most use on my Victorianox multitool is the knife and bottle opener. 3D printing a knife doesn’t sound like a good idea so I decided to integrate a bottle opener into a money clip. This money clip could then be slid in and out of the top of the wallet, sliding into the slot created in the tab.

Tutorial Comments

Within my tutorial I presented my work on the development of my hinge. Again, I used the tutorial as an open forum to gauge my tutors and peers reactions to my work. My tutor thought that my older designs for the hinge were quite bulky, and that I am on my way to developing a thinner and more sleek one. I agreed that I have come a good way from my initial design, and that I still had a bit of refinement to do until I am happy with it. I feel that the design still doesn’t look quite right, and would the hinge is too large compared to the wallet body that would be put onto it. However, if I decreased the size of the gears, I could run into tolerance issues with the HP multijet production system. Another comment that I received from my tutors was the question of why would someone buy my wallet compared to any other. This was a great question, as even though I had created distinct features I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to purchase my design over any other. A suggestion was to add more functionality to my wallet. From this, I will look back at my research and find unique solutions to problems found at that stage.