Engineering news
An award-winning idea for a special spoon that helps people with shaky hands eat without spilling food has been quickly brought into production with the support of Proto Lab’s rapid injection moulding services.
Finding it almost impossible to eat with normal cutlery due to having Cerebral Palsy, Grant Douglas conceived an idea for a spoon that would have a lid. Working with industrial designer Mark Penver from the Glasgow-based agency 4C Design, they set about bringing Grant’s idea to life. After creating a few prototype ideas and eliminating the lid concept, the design process led to a unique idea of a spoon with a deep capacity.
Spurred on by a successful initial trial, the team turned to Kickstarter to raise sufficient funds to turn the prototypes into a commercially available product. With the financial backing secured they contacted Proto Labs who sent out a free material sample kit, so they could start to select suitable materials and finishes. Together, with their expertise they determined that polypropylene or ABS with a beaded finish provided the best surface finish – allowing the food to freely slip out of the spoon head
To make sure the spoon was right they trialled it with others, by outsourcing a batch of spoons to be vacuum cast in a resin similar to ABS. Feedback was excellent, with one user declaring that they could “eat soup without changing their top.”
Fuelled by huge demand for the product which was to become known as the S’up Spoon, the next step was to take the prototype into an initial production run. Mark contacted Proto Labs for a quote to produce injection moulded S’up Spoons for low-volume production. The product was optimised with a series of changes following the company’s free analysis of the design’s suitability for injection moulding.
Mark Penver commented: “Proto Labs offering to produce the spoons within fifteen days, was outstanding – other quotes we had received were more than three to four months to make the tool. We placed an order for an initial batch of 100 spoons in polypropylene to check that the tool was okay.”
“The spoons from the initial production run can back amazingly well and we immediately placed an order for a further 900 spoons that were produced within a couple of weeks!
“The advice offered by Proto Labs proved to be very helpful and they were patient during the quoting process – even though we went through 20 or more iterations as the design evolved. The quotes always came back within hours, which is in stark contrast to the one or two weeks that other moulding companies took.”
Mark went on to explain that selecting a UK manufacturer was important to his team and that when in Birmingham for the NAIDEX exhibition, he was able to visit Proto Lab’s Telford manufacturing base for a tour of the facilities: “It was mind blowing that parts could be produced in just one day and their approach has saved us a considerable amount of money.” he added.
“Using Proto Labs we’ve been able to get the S’up Spoon out into the market much faster and not just improve the lives of people with cerebral palsy but those with similar symptoms such as essential tremors and Parkinson’s disease.”
The success of the S’up Spoon has led 4C Design into forming a company with Grant Douglas called S’up Products and at the time of writing there is 14 distributors worldwide trying to secure exclusivity of the spoon and the team are planning to develop further products.
www.sup-products.com