Fourslide Case Study

THE CHALLENGE:

Using the customer’s existing body, cross-wire from one side of the body to the opposite side pins.

The body and the existing wire configurations which are cut-to-length, stripped and pre-formed by hand get placed by hand and hand soldered at all joints: a rather time-consuming assembly operation. OK for prototypes, but not for production.

THE SOLUTION:

Our initial step was to design a manufacturable piece to replace the labor-intensive wires.

Since there were two discreet wires, two pre-formed pieces were needed for the assembly, each with slightly different forming.

The wire EDM’d blanks were hand formed for prototyping and initial customer design sanction.

Used together, they accomplish the same cross-over wiring solution as the wires did.

But there were still two separate pieces that both needed hand soldering.

So we combined two pieces into one with a “bridge”, and incorporated solder-bearing material.

Assembly was simplified by the placement of only one piece.

The second step is to clip the “bridge” out and wave soldering can be incorporated,since the material is solder-bearing. The tedious hand soldering becomes history.