Design

Red Arete can help you with mechanical engineering design for your products, tooling and plant. With experience in sheet metal work, fabrication, mould tooling, automotive, off-highway and sub sea.

The design process can be improved buy taking advantage of leading edge technology like our rapid prototyping facility. Being able to have a low cost functional model or assembly to test prior to signing the design off is a very useful step identifying design errors before production.

Design

Engineering design support can be given to help you find an engineering solution where companies have no engineering resource.

See fig 1. A concept design for a hydrostatic drive for a passenger car with up to 100Nm of torque.

Development of existing products to make them easier and cheaper to produce or taking a concept idea through to a production ready product. This can also be supported by the rapid prototype facility to help in product development, proof of concept and reduce the time to market

Fig 1. Hydrostatic transmission

Sheet Metal

Fully formed sheet metal designs can be easily split up into individual parts when designed in a 3D feature based modeler like SolidWorks or Pro/ENGINEER. Theses parts can be flattened and used to drive a CNC Laser profile or CNC Punch machine. The parts remain associative to the original and any changes in the master part appear in the flat pattern.

The simplified Pharmaceutical Isolator shell, See fig 2., is built up from an original 3D master model and 3 parts that are used to convey the manufacturing detail in folded and flat states prior to welding .

Development of flat patterns do not take long to do but care is always taken to ensure the correct 'K-Factor' for the material used. Then when providing detail drawings that it is made clear which way the folds are made.

Fig 2. Isolator Shell