Facilities
Dovetailing and overlapping
Studio with 4 floor plates, 2 lift tables
3 Axis Studio Mill for clay and model board
CHD’s Facilities
CHD Design Works is based in the UK, in the English Midlands.
Design Studio
Our design studio has been purpose-built for our requirements and incorporates 4 floor plates with full CMM coverage and 2 lift tables. We have a 3-Axis milling machine capable of machining a fully-faired motorcycle in one set-up if required. This can machine clay and model-board. Most of the hard models we have built since its acquisition have had their model-board components machined by us in-house.
Our studio floor plates carry a universal mounting arrangement that allows us to quickly move the model from one plate to another if necessary and also to move it to the milling machine in minutes when required.
Clay Milling
Our 3-Axis milling machine makes it possible for us to rapidly progress our design work, ensuring that our clay modellers are able to spend as much of their time as possible on the value-added task of resolving and refining 3D form rather than on copying over or blocking out.
The milling machine has become an intrinsic part of our process, reducing design down-time to a minimum and allowing CAD surfaces to be rapidly transferred to the clay model.
A large proportion of hard model parts are also made on our milling machine and this allows us to compress times to a bare minimum and to continue to resolve and refine surfaces up to the eleventh hour when necessary
Faro Arm Scanner
Scanning
We use a Faro Arm Edge scanner in-house as an integral part of our process. This is an expensive option compared to other scanning systems that are available but our investigations proved that the combination of surface resolution and global positioning accuracy was simply not good enough for our requirements with other systems.
The scanner allows us to transfer clay surfaces quickly and accurately back into our and our clients’ CAD assemblies for feasibility checking and to rapidly copy-over (mirror) and replicate our surfaces via our 3-axis mill. Again, the objective of this is to minimise down-time and to allow the team to focus on the core function of developing the design and adding value to the product without becoming distracted by other functions that do not directly contribute to the end result. Although we have full manual pointing off capability with our floor plates and CMMs, the scanner largely removes the need for laborious manual processes that draw in skilled clay modellers whose time is better spent on the development of the design of the bike.
CAD Capability
CHD’s team are all conversant with 3D CAD and this is our default method of communication once the sketch ideation phase has been passed.
Between our Designers, CAD modellers, A-Class Surfacers and Concept Engineers we use a variety of software packages to suit the full range of work from concept initiation through to final A-Surface release.
The software packages in daily use at CHD include:
PTC Creo, Autodesk Alias, Siemens NX, Polyworks, Rhino 3D, Autodesk VRED and Work NC.
Other Facilities
We have a spray shop, hard model shop and machining facilities in house, including a CNC 3-Axis vertical mill, manual milling machine and a toolroom lathe.
Our hard model gallery gives a good idea of our capabilities:
We also have full TIG and MIG welding capability.
We have been known to build entire running motorcycles, almost from scratch, in our workshop facilities.
Our motivation for being able to undertake all functions in house is to be fully self-sufficient where it benefits the design process and the end product.
This ability to compress the design-to-review time to a minimum often proves to be vital in ensuring that overall timings can be held and that iterations can be accommodated without undue impact on the project end date.
