In the show we are lead to believe that their inventions go from a design on paper to an actual product almost overnight.

There's no way that something like the BodyRocker could get rushed out in such a short space of time - surely it would take at least a couple of days to set up the mould and make the product?

I know it's the magic of TV, but it would be nice to know how long it really takes!

Pay enough, and you can get anything (pretty well) made overnight.

JJ

To make any kind of production run you would need soft tooling and that takers weeks. You could use a mould to produe a rough prototype but you would only be able to produce about half a dozen off of it and the finish would not be good.

I doubt very much either of these prototypes were state of the art if you think about it.

One of them looked like a toolkit box and the other like a toilet pan seat

This is the company: http://www.designworksgroup.net/apprentice.htm

Their site has a page about Rapid Prototyping, which says:

Using our in-house 3D Solid object printer we have developed a number of innovative techniques to enhance the development of components. The end result being the ability to concept, model & output a vacuum-cast resin component in a single day.

So I think it's kosher, and they really did produce what we saw overnight.

There is no way at all it could be done in those timescales even with rapid prototyping. It just not possible particularly as they are starting with rough paper sketches and not 3D CAD models

So the "model & output in a single day" is false advertising? I don't think so. "Model" here means the time to turn the paper sketches into 3D CAD. It looked like they started around 3pm and finished around 6am, so around 15 hours or 2 working days if they continued through the night, which they surely did. It's doable.

The alternative is to suppose the teams had a day off in the middle of the task, which isn't really credible.

What was it about the products that would be so difficult to produce? The mechanics of the death box was probably a pain in the ass, but the bodyrocker looked simple enough to me.

Moulds aren't made by hand these days so its perfectly viable for it to be done overnight if a long amount of time is spent instead of just the working day

IMO they, the BBC, tried to 'con' the viewers!

I agree with others here in that there was 'no way' a prototype of that quality could have been designed/modelled and produced - from scratch (with absolutely no firm knowledge of any possible production run costs) overnight!

The Company must surely been pre-prepared with lots of information by the Beeb, or Seralan?

Its precise form wasn't even seen to have been finalised the night before the following morning!

The 'team' certainly had no real input and were most probably amazed when they saw what 'they' had developed (ended up with) the next day?

What a different outcome for the knocked-up 'box'?

Another, quite important, little detail - at what price were John Lewis paying for and gonna sell this training gem at?

What about the tooling costs, its finish and durability, health and safety (might be liable to slip on a smooth surface, for example) and who tested it and for how long before ordering?

And, girls ... what size handbag would it actually fit into?

Seralan must be laughing all the way to his penthouse ...

£17 an item, and they would sell them at £29.99 as they said in the pitches

Sorry, my point was - who worked out the actual tooling/production costs, when, and based on how many?

All done over that same night ...?

Take it from me:

1- Prototypes like this can easily be done overnight, i know as i've had lots done in the past.

2- Designworks are specialists, again i would expect them to be up to this challenge.

3- Costing comes from experience, and there are even specialised software packages that tooling designers use to produce BOMs & costs.

4- A team of people would have been working on these, all used to working together to tight deadlines.

5- You get loads of people who post on forums about subjects they know jack shit about!

Hear Hear!

Are you one of the loads of people or are you a CAD engineer who might have been involved with the design of plastic mouldings BelligerentB.?

And were the prototype mouldings that you collected next day already designed, modelled and approved by your company first..?

I am aware of the other stuff you refer to - but I find it difficult to believe that dreamworks had no prior knowledge at all of what was required of them - given the sketchy information evident on my telly!

As for the £17 price . . pulled out of thin air before they had a clue as to how many might be ordered .. I doubt they would be very familiar with the costs involved in producing injection moulding tooling?

Feel free to shoot me, and others, down in flames BB..

A CAD engineer who is involved in the design of plastic mouldings of various techniques.


Designed & modelled yes, approved no. That was the point of the overnight turnaround, obviously.


They probably didn't, but that has nothing to do with whether they are capable of picking it up and running with it, does it?


I don't quote 'off tool' because i'm not involved directly with that aspect anymore, instead i now push out designs to combined toolmakers/moulders, they normally just need material, qualtity, cm3 volume (or a solids draft), plus a contributions qty, and they can quote back with various breaks up to 2 million units if it is required. It really is no big deal, honestly. It's quite possible for the apprentices to have that info in front of them, from Designworks, during a negotiation, just like a saleman would.

Prototyping, moulding, etc is something which most people have no experience of, not that you'd think that by the volley of 'experts' on here dissing the expertise of Designworks!

You response tells me you have not the slightest clue as to what you are talking about.

The process is basically a serial process. It would take at least 48 hours to get rough mock ups out. To get to the stage of production tools can take weeks. It can take hours to get th machine set up and usually you end up have to fine tune the tooling. Plastic mouldings and extrusions are not easy to make.

Production hard tooling is very expensive and can run from several hundred pound to several thousand pounds.

To mould something in plastic and to be able to sell and proce it at a sensible price needs serious volume. Probably looking at least a 100K units a year any thing much less is not really viable.


Looking at the complexity and size of it being able to sell it for under £30 would be impossible. It used different coloured moulding as well which pushes up the cost

Difficult to tell how much assembly time but it did not look to be great maybe 5 minutes which would equate to about £2.50. It looked fairly big so retail pakaging etc would be another £2 or £3. Shipping etc another £3 odd.

Bob22a, your last two posts prove that you're talking absolute shit. You're costs tell me you went bust years ago, probably in the 90's, which makes sense, judging by the levels of technical & costing expertise you're demonstrating, also from the 90's.

Tell you what, why don't you tell us all how you would have made the Body Rocka prototype, and what tooling approach you would adopt for a production run, let's say 100,000 units as you suggest.

By the way, £2.50 for 5 minutes assy time? How fukking much are you going to pay the chinese to put these together, £30/h ?? You're completely off your plate mate.

And as for this quote..


... i'm still laughing at that. Exactly which tooling type are you talking about here, injection, vacuum, rotation, etc?

Psst guys......

Its not real.
Its an entertainment programme on the telly.

I can make a kinder egg toy in a matter of SECONDS.

Bob22A has a history of posting incorrect numbers as facts.

Also do the bidders actually buy the products for real. John Lewis ordered 10000 of the body rocker. Has anyone seen them on sale??? And didnt one of them order some death boxes

I always assumed the "orders" were just what the companies would hypothetically buy if they were actually presented with the item by real people, but then again, at the time, I thought they were actually going to build the tower Simon proposed in the Season 3 finale

what I don't get is how John Lewis could order 10k of a product which has not been professionally tested.