Starboard Engineers Roy Ruscelli and Cawarot Pangla take us deep into the heart of Starboard’s R&D process and explain how they use the power of 3D printing technology to create the most amazing paddle boards that are loved all around the world. Roy and Cawarot also discuss the huge benefits that 3D printing technology has over more traditional methods of research & design cycles in the manufacturing process.
“Probably the foremost advantage to CAD engineering is the ability to share concepts and designs globally in a matter of minutes. This allows us to communicate designs to everyone from team riders to manufacturing facilities in the blink of an eye.”
~ Roy Ruscelli
“This improves the R&D process a lot as the development period is fast tracked, reducing development cost, and reducing errors in the manufacturing process.”
~ Cawarot Pangla
What advantages can you drive from using 3D printing technology compared to the traditional working methods in Starboard?
Roy: Probably the foremost advantage to CAD engineering is the ability to share concepts and designs globally in a matter of minutes. This allows us to communicate designs to everyone from team riders to manufacturing facilities in the blink of an eye.
CAD technology allows us to better visualize the projects before any material is cut allowing for significant materials savings. We can do very accurate weight and displacement calculations for the boards for example prior to fabrication. If target displacement is not met we can easily scale the paddle boards design to meet our design criteria before any materials are cut.
Paddleboards built from computer modelling, assuming your CNC equipment is well-tuned will always be symmetrical, something possible but certainly very difficult to achieve by hand. It should be possible to make exact copies of boards with CNC, something seldom achieved by hand.
Film: The technology of Computer-Aided Design w (CAD), Comput-er-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and Computer-Aided Engineering (-CAE) has improved a lot and has become cheaper and easier for users to navigate and use efficiently. This improves the R&D process by reducing development period, reducing development cost, and reducing errors in the manufacturing process.
Which projects do you plan to release next and what do you hope for the future on the development of 3D Technology?
Roy: We are currently engaged in streamlining the transition from 2D patterns, spreadsheets and physical masters for board specifications (A starboard specialty) to the CAD cam environment. We are streamlining our CAD information collection and input to work closely with our 25+ year workshop standards as well a taking advantage of newer 3d scanning technologies to generate CAD based masters. This should allow us to get products to market quickly and bring our riders the latest designs as efficiently as possible.
Film: Another technology which will heavily benefit for our company is the ‘3D scanning technology’. It is a powerful tool which allows us to get the 3D file from any object. From this we can complete the ‘reverse engineering’ process to make an accurate drawing file to apply for other purpose. In the near future I hope we will consider having our own 3D scanner to speed up our design process.
What do you personally think about the future of 3D design in the SUP industry?
Roy: Once we have developed an extensive library of the latest board models as well as some of the greatest designs from past years, we will be able to use computer analysis to determine where the new boards excel as well as which aspects of the older designs still remain applicable to today’s SUP market.
Film: I hope to see many new technologies and tools in our company
to help us advance quicker and better. Right now we have specialists who take care teaching us how to use the new tools and I am always exctied to apply these learnings to product developments.
