As Director of Engineering, I worked with in-house design, sourcing and quality teams to bring new products and finishes to market. I was also responsible for troubleshooting manufacturing issues and improving product quality and performance.
tactile Finishes
3d textures
I developed a workflow that allows us to build production tooling directly from 2D depth maps, avoiding the requirement of building parametric models of the desired surfaces. This allows for extremely organic textures to be made with ease.
etched textures
I developed a new production process using a laser etched acid mask to create fully textured stainless bottles. I implemented an Illustrator warping mesh to compensate for the distortion of the production laser equipment so that artwork could be batch modified.
Process Improvements
Automation - Water Transfer
I worked with our factories to developed an automated dipping mechanism to improve decorating consistency and increase yield.
Reduced sublimation blur
I developed a process improvement to reduce the blurriness of sublimation image transfers . The bottle on the right shows before and the left shows after this new process was implemented.
Product Design
improved painted cap assembly
I designed a new assembly method for painted bottle caps to remove the groove and black plastic lip typically required. Right side shows before and left side shows after. When producing painted caps the metal is snapped on during final assembly. My design hides the fastening features inside the cap.
drink-through caps
I designed the mechanism and built the CAD files for a line of drink-through caps. The caps are skinned in stainless steel, requiring internal seals to keep water out of the assembly. The above image is a Keyshot rendering of my Solidworks files.
Insulated Drink-through
Fully stainless skinned drink-through caps present a unique design challenge. If the vessel is filled with hot liquids, the stainless surface quickly becomes too hot to drink from. I solved this problem by designing a sealed air pocket in the core of this drink-through cap. The air pocket provides enough insulation for the top stainless surface to shed heat to the surrounding air and remain cool enough to drink from. This also improves the thermal performance of the vessel. The air pocket is over-molded shut to prevent water from entering.
Images are Keyshot renderings of my Solidworks files.