Gut Check: Logitech Trackman Wheel

Another submission from Bruce Buck at SolidSmack brings us up close and personal with Logitech’s Trackman Wheel. Check out the stop-motion video of his dissection.

[via SolidSmack]

 

Gut Check: 3Dconnexion SpaceExplorer

SolidSmack contributor Bruce Buck gets bored. And when Bruce gets bored, he takes stuff apart (don’t we all?). There is sooooo much you can learn about product design and engineering by taking apart well-design (as well as not-so-well-designed) products to see what makes them tick. Let’s hear about Gut Check from Bruce himself:

Gut Check is a tribute to all the design, engineering, and manufacturing peeps out there using 3D/2D/Whatever-D day in and day out, to create and bring to life the products that we all use and enjoy every day. You’re the ones who are down in the trenches, making it happen. It’s also a look at the complexity and beauty of seemingly simple products. One look under the hood will reveal that almost anything is a “large assembly” and requires an enormous amount of time and effort to make everything come together in something that embodies the epitome of form, fit, and function.

I, for one, am a fan. Keep it up, Bruce and I’ll post some as well ’cause I LOVES to take stuff apart.

By the way, with regards to his “unexpected” finding of a weight plate, I too have found some interesting and curious additions of weight to products.

[via SolidSmack]

 

The Beautiful Plasticy Innards of the HTC Evo 4G

I loves me some product tear downs… One and Co designer Donn Koh shares the beauty (inside and out) of the HTC Evo 4G. Great products are those that look great far away and close-up (as well as when you tear it apart). This is the kind of stuff I’d like to see in museums–the blending of art, design and technology.

[via SolidSmack and Behance]

iPad Teardown: An Engineering Design Perspective by LUNAR

Boy, I loves me some product autopsies… In this Icon-o-Cast episode, LUNAR’s crack team of engineers dismantle an iPad and turn a critical eye toward the engineering principles used in this revolutionary new device asking, “Did Apple’s product designers throw out the rule book or did they follow generally accepted engineering principles?”

There’s some great little nuggets about spot welds and CNC machining and a nice companion to that video is the iFixit teardown with higher-res images.

[Thanks for the tip, Julius Tarng on the Core77 M&P discussion board]

Design for Disassembly: An Essential Guide

(From Core77)

Creative Director and Sketchbook Fanatic at Pensar Development in Seattle, Alex Diener gets down and dirty with an in-depth look at Design for Disassembly. With the help of Senior Industrial Designer Kristin Will, his Core77 blog entry lays out the rationale and methodology for a design strategy that considers the future need to disassemble a product for repair, refurbish or recycle.

Hyundai Genesis Teardown

The engineering section of the Hyundai Genesis website features a mesmerizing time-lapse video of a Genesis being completely disassembled like biology lab frog. Once disassembled, you can zoom in, pan around and examine the individual pieces.

MacBook Polycarbonate Unibody Teardown

 

The folks at iFixit have done us a solid by tearing apart the newly redesigned MacBook with a polycarbonate unibody design.So it looks like Apple is creating two tiers of products, using the machined aluminum for their premium offering and polycarbonate for the lower-cost option. From Appleinsider.com:

Earlier this spring, Apple restructured its notebook offerings by repositioning its aluminum unibody MacBooks as premium offerings under the MacBook Pro moniker, adding long-requested features such as FireWire and higher-quality displays. This left the company with just a single MacBook offering, a white polycarbonate model that retails for $999 but sticks out like a sore thumb when positioned alongside its peers.

So one question that’s been posed is: How is the polycarbonate case made? Machined or molded? So let’s take a look at iFixit’s images…

From what I can see, I think it’s molded… I would hope that they molded the polycarbonate since doing a lot of secondary finishing would be kinda expensive… but honestly I can’t quite tell since the big image of the underside shows recessed lettering that could be machined (although the little bit that would be required would be kinda crazy… but I wouldn’t put it past Apple…). So I’m 75% sure it’s molded….

Apple’s web site just refers to polycarbonate as recyclable, but doesn’t say the case itself is made from recycled polycarbonate (not bloody likely since recycled stock would have to have zero random bits of other colors which would never pass Apple’s standards). If anybody has had direct contact with one of these puppies, see if you can tell…

(Thanks for the tip, Vince!)

What’s That?: Adding Dead Weight

So I was working on a project that utilized the recording capabilities of the Pinnacle Video Transfer–a useful little widget that transfers a video feed directly to a storage device via USB.

iFixit Teardowns

iFixit was started in 2003 by a couple of guys at Cal Poly in their dorm room as a laptop repair shop. The only  problem: most of that stuff didn’t come with a repair manual and little if anything was available to the public. So they did it the hard way: tinkering and fiddling until they figured it out. They started to sell repair guides and spare parts from all the stuff they took apart (and eBay) and thus their business was born.  Since then, iFixit has grown into a valuable resource for for repair documentation and spare parts that end-users just can’t get from the manufacturer (mostly Apple). Their plan is to collaboratively build a database of repair manuals for all sorts of products – anything where the user can’t get support from the manufacturer. (Necessity is definitely the mama of repair manuals…)

And that, in itself, is really cool…

But for me who loves to take stuff apart to see how it ticks, iFixit features an entire section devoted to Gadget Teardowns. (Cue the choir singing in the background…) While most of these teardowns, autopsies, take-aparts – whatever you want to call them – are for the ultimate purpose of assembling a repair manual, they’re soooo much more. To me they’re a peek into how great products are designed, methodized and constructed.

“Methodized?”

Well, yes. All of these products (with maybe the exception of the banana teardown – no I’m not kidding), these are very complicated products. And all of that stuff has to fit inside a neat little package compelling enough for  somebody to slap down their hard-earned bills for. I just get the biggest kick out of seeing how all of the complicated mash-up of plastic, sheet metal, electronics, wires and whatnot all find a home inside the product. As a designer, it shows me what you can get away with (and sometime what you can’t).

So iFixit’s site is a place where you can see the latest techno-porn get ripped apart without spending your own nickle. They’re all there for your sick amusement: all the iPod variations, lots of cell phones like the iPhones and the Palm Pre, a Nintendo Wii… Even {sniff} the Pleo robotic dinosaur… They even provide you a step-by-step guide on how to create your own teardown and post it to the site to be shared with everyone else.

So get out those screwdrivers and get to work!

Product Autopsy Workshop

I love this stuff… I mean honestly, who DOESN’T love taking gadgets apart and seeing what makes the tick and how they’re put together? It’s one of the more common childhood stories you hear from fellow product designers… Like whenever something broke at my house growing up, it would always come to me first. Could I always put it back together? Well, that’s another story… anyways, it was already broken when I got it.

As a product designer, there’s nothing so useful as taking a product apart. You get a lot of good ideas: how to do something, how not to do something, specific plastic joint details, assembly techniques… on and on… I drive my wife nuts because I’m always turning products upside down to see how their made…

So Leonardo Bonanni is a PhD candidate in the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab. And he ran this Product Autopsy Workshop a few years ago:

I ran a workshop for sponsors and students called ‘Product Autopsy’ at John Maeda’s Simplicity Meeting on Cape Cod in March 2007. Various objects were dissected and their function, manufacturing and design teased out of them as they were pinned to white boards. In every case, the resulting product+narrative was much more beautiful than the original.

I’m always on the look out for more of this kind of stuff . When I find more I’ll bring it to you here (and tag it so you can find it).