sharkbait 2023

I took PD350 this winter term with Tom Bonamici where I learned about multiple different manufacturing processes through on-site visits of local manufacturing facilities in and around the Eugene area. We visited Whitewater designs, Arcimoto, Urban Lumber (I could write an entire post on this awesome company and you should absolutely check them out), APEL Extrusions, and more. After learning about zinc die casting and injection molding, I began developing a rack/wall mount for my surfboard back home.

Back home, my current mount is made of metal and wood that screws into a stud in my bedroom wall. It is poorly designed since the lips of the board slits dig into the profile of my board and leave skid marks of where the wood/metal touches the board. It's also quite ugly. Boring highly reflective gray metal with this light colored wood makes for an awkward and useless mount that just had to be replaced. I wanted to fix these problems and also find a way to incorporate my learnings from Bonamici's manufacturing class.

Ideation was actually a simple process for this project. I had this idea of a small rectangular form with counterintuitive slits and just made alterations to the general form as I went from sketch to paper model to CAD to rendering. This was one of the first projects I've done where I was designing something for myself and already had a product I was trying to make fit my consumer needs.

I really started getting creative after Tom told me I should play around with more materials than just Zinc. I have been really focused on finding sustainable options for most manufacturing processes since Bonamici has the tendency to scare me about what my environmental impact is in every class I've taken with him. After our lecture on rubber, plastics, and silicones I did some more research into natural rubber and redesigned my mount to completely remove the metal to board user touch point and rather have a biodegradable, ocean-safe cushion for my board.

The name sharkbait has a funny story too. I have the tendency to get lost in the sauce at the Olive Product Design Studio where I will sit in the lab in the afternoon to work in Rhino and somehow it will become 12 am before I know it. After another lovely evening of prototyping, I was going to email all of my CAD files, sketches, etc. to myself as a backup in case I lost my files on my computer (I could also write a post on the technology issues of this term), and I named the email chain subject line as "sharkbait oo aa aa" after that nightmarish hazing scene from Finding Nemo. And sharkbait just stuck I guess.

Overall, I had the best time ever creating this product! I learned about so many technicalities like draft, radii, bosses, ribs, snap-fits, etc. and it was fun to create something original from start to finish. I hope I can continue to make alterations to this product to get it to a point to be manufactured in a small quantity. I know the satisfaction of putting my board on my own mounts will be the peak of my surfing and possibly amateur product design journey.

P.S. Shout-out Tom Bonamici as always he finds a way to drag the innovator out of me and pushes me to create things I would never think to create.

-Saachi Poddar