This project originally came about several years ago and was the brainchild of Kenyon Lee, one of my colleagues at work. The cradle took him tens of hours for him to produce by hand, so I stepped into help streamline the production of the phone cradles. My goal from here was to lessen the number of hours it would take to produce one of the cradles.
Below is a picture of the different iterations I went through from the original prototype made by Ken in the back to the most recent version in the foreground of the photo.
Originally I spent some time brainstorming about different manufacturing processes that could be used to make this part. I thought about making it by milling out several layers of acrylic and then gluing them together similarly to how the original prototype was made. I opted out of this because of the difficulty of designing this product using CAD software. I then thought about building them using a 3D printer. This seemed like a possible process to use, but I questioned the strength and the resolution of a 3D printer. Also, the same issue of creating the part in CAD software was still present. I did some research on how to get the part 3D scanned, but the scanners are costly and I would have to take a gamble on how good the resolution would be. I then remembered an episode on the Youtube channel, created by Adam Savage, called Tested, where they recreated a lightsaber by creating a silicone mold and then cast the part using epoxy resin. This seemed like the best, and most cost-effective solution.
Since creating our own mold (below) we have now cast several of the parts.
The parts are coming out with some defects, but these can easily be mended. Overall I was able to save Ken several days worth of work, and we are now producing a much higher quality product.
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