That’s Orange County New York (not CA, not FL, not NJ…)
Most of us design stuff that will be manufactured in bulk. Some folks design stuff that will only be made once. I’m always interested in different design processes, and tools. It recently struck me that there is one place where process and tools collide in some interesting ways; theDiscovery Channel’s American Chopper show. We’re all familiar with the chopper that OCC built for SolidWorks. If you follow the show, you get to see the design guy (Jason Pohl) and the manufacturing engineer (Jim Quinn) get thrown some curveballs to try to create imaginative stuff quickly with the tools at hand.
Jason Pohl in front of a collection of his hand and computer renderings
Today, I had the opportunity to visit with Jason and Jim of Orange County Choppersand talk about the tools they use to get their jobs done. I just happened to be in Newburgh, NY today, and thought I’d stop by and talk shop with the guys. Well, there was more to it than that, but nobody cares about how we got here, just that we’re here.
Jason uses a combination of SolidWorks and 3DSmax to create 3D geometry, depending on what he will use the geometry for. Some of the geometry (including some of the SolidWorks data) is just made for “looks like” data – just to get approval from the customers, which is usually done in the form of a nice glossy print out. He says customers don’t generally get to review designs in 3D mainly because the entire design may not exist in 3D.
5-axis water jet work on rear fender and tank. Nice hand tooled leather too.
Like many industrial designers, Jason also uses Photoshop for 2D views and Illustrator for things like logos. Often shots of 3D SolidWorks data is combined with strictly 2D views to produce a composite image that conveys the entire design idea to the customer for approval.
Parts like motors, transmissions, fenders, and others are purchased off the shelf, because even a custom bike builder doesn’t build absolutely everything on the bike from raw stock.
The parts that are built in-house come from a variety of sources. Jim Quinn is the CNC master, combining with Jason wielding SolidWorks to pull off some amazing parts where textures like bone, claw, leather and knife blades combine on a single CNCed part. Jim also runs a 5-axis water jet which is a wonder to behold. Cutting “spline on surface” type shapes out of fenders gives OCC bikes an advantage in the level of insanity they can execute when cutting formed sheet metal. Jim uses Mastercam to create toolpaths from Jason’s IGES data. Even the coolest shops may not do everything using textbook methods. Mastercam should be able to read SolidWorks files direct, or at least Parasolid for fewer errors and faster file reading.
Rick Petko’s dream bike was in the lobby, along with dozens of other OCC creations.
And then there is Rick Petko, the magician tin-knocker. Rick is responsible for manually forming the custom sheet metal work. CNC data does nothing for Rick. This is old time serious manual skill, shaping sheet metal to look like whatever Jason puts on paper, with maybe a couple of reference dimensions.
Rick does the custom gas tanks, fenders, oil reservoirs, and other custom formed steel parts. Metal doesn’t always form the way CAD data does.
Like the hand-tooled leather and the delicious paint jobs on some of these bikes, you can’t express all of the design in 3D or even on the computer at all. The design of these machines really is the intersection between new and old, high and low tech. But it’s all stuff that requires a lot of personal skill, and this team has or can access all of the talent it needs to pull off any design and fab job.
The one conflict that Jason and I talked about a little bit is the ease of use to make swoopy concepts with 3DSmax, but the poor quality data that it puts out to MasterCam. And on the other hand, making crazy shapes in SolidWorks is not easy, and for the speed of the turnaround it’s just not time effective – having a “whole day” to create a model seemed like an unrealistic dream to Jason – but you sometimes need that smoother NURBS data to get good stuff out.
I’ll come back and do a Part II on this to talk about the mesh vs nurbs conflict that keeps coming up, and some ways you might be able to work around it.
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There were a couple of funny stories that might come from my visit. Here’s one I think I can tell from the safe distance of a couple of states.
I’m standing with Jason in his office, and Paul Sr. walks in.
“I’m gonna be famous. My stuff is gonna be in a book.” Says Jason who is already on years of re-runs of one of the highest rated shows on television.
Paul, looking in my direction, says “I’m smarter than you. I wrote two books.”
I try to look impressed, not wanting to see if my head would go through the door without opening it. “Yes, but are they as thick as this one?”
Paul’s feathers ruffle slightly then his biceps flex as he hefts the tome. “This is crap. I’m smarter than you. I wrote two books.”
Love it.
I wish Paul well.
I just don’t have time for comp.cad.solidworks. In the “old” days, there weren’t any blogs.
Between work, blogs, and e-mails (only during working hours), my day is full.
Devon
I applaud Paul’s efforts and understand why he wants to save a great database of SW info and give it a spark, but I’m skeptical about it being effective. I used to be a regular reader that would chime in once in a while, but gave up for the same reasons already stated. It is a shame though because, like you said, I learned so much from reading the newsgroup several times a day. It’s sad that I had to part ways, but at this point it’s kinda like going back to an old girlfriend just because I’m feeling desperate. “It’s not you. It’s me.” -c.c.sw