PLASTIC FOOTBALL MASK

A startup company needed a plastic prototype of a football mask.  Although they had no design or material specs, they knew that the prototype must look , feel and perform like an injection molded part.  It also would have to pass special tests simulating the severe impact which a football mask is subjected to in professional games.  All they had was an issued patent covering the basic concept of a plastic instead of steel mask.  They had attempted to fabricate a mask from plastic rods instead of steel.  The results were completely unacceptable.  They could not even consider the costly tooling that would be required to actually injection mold the prototype.
I designed the mask, developed the process and material required and made several prototypes which were successfully tested at Dayton AFB using a ball drop test.
Today, the injection molded production mask is made and marketed by RIDDELL, a leading manufacturer of football equipment.

PLASTIC HOUSE

A client wanted a house that could be light weight and simple to assemble.  The idea was that it would be used for hard to reach vacation spots and could be assembled by two people.  It was to be light enough so that the unassembled kit could be transported by helicopter if necessary.
The photo shows a scale model I designed and constructed.  It was made the same way that the full sized house would be.  The production house would have a central core housing the necessary utilities.  The floor and roof sections were to be lightweight foam with fiberglass skins.  Assembly would be by bolting the pie shaped sections together.  Screw jack legs would allow adjustment to uneven terrain.  The production house was never built.

MEDICAL CANISTER AND COVER

Although this deep, thin walled fiberglass reinforced plastic canister would be difficult to mold even with the use of metal tooling, I developed a unique process and the equipment to matched die mold the canister and it's cover in plastic tooling.  A custom hydraulic press was integrated into the tooling and almost 1,000 sets of parts were produced for a supplier of medical equipment.  The canister was subjected to several inches of vacuum in an application which required chemical resistance as well as strength.