2017 saw a huge range of very different projects.

I hate it when you look at companies "latest news" and it's from a year ago, so I have let myself down here a bit. My only excuse was it was quite a busy year...

The vast majority of the initial work I was lucky enough to be involved with in 2017 was with Ben Scott-Geddes from (an Italian OEM), carrying on helping them develop some composite parts for certain road cars. Much as I would like to say what cars they are, I cant.... All I can say is that the study was extremely successful, with the finished parts costing very close to the aluminum parts whilst improving the performance of the car. Which was the initial aim of the project.

I was also lucky enough to help our Ben Ainslie's LR BAR team with the development of their final race spec steering wheels for their America's Cup Race boat. Once again, not much I can say on that project either, apart from to say that as far as I believe, they made it on the final boat!

In mid March, I was contacted by Neil Cheston, who has started a business called Kabina, who are creating great new homes for the UK's floodzones. I have been working closely with both Neil and Guy Lane in creating some of the basic concepts for them, and looking at some of the mass and geometry aspects to make sure the houses all float at the correct time.

In amoungst doing these bigger projects, I have been working woth Simon Fry and his various projects with Provezza. We did some "NVH tweeks" for the TP52 and some work on the Dragon.

As per the last few years, we have been lucky to carry on all the work we have been doing with Antony Dodworth, from Bright Lite Structures. This work has predominatly been on the various aerospace projects he is working on, doing some of the part and tooling design for him.

And finally, and perhaps most exciting, in September 2017 I was introduced to Rachael Tapp, who had founded a start up business called SmartSail Systems and joined her business as a shareholder and director to help her get the SmartSail devices into production.

In simple terms, SmartSail is the only product available for all sailors that monitors the usage, wear & tear and location of all the sails. It is a small device that is fitted to a sail by the sailmaker, and has the sail ID encoded within (i.e. when the sail was made, what materials, what mould etc, how many days before service, how many days before replacement etc). Using the Smart Sail App, the sailors and sailmakers can then continually track the usage and location of that sail. It monitors such items as hours of flogging, hours in UV, where the sail is, temperature range, how may tacks etc. This data is also processed through bespoke cloud based algorithms that we have created with the University of Southampton, which will say how much “life” is left in the sail in relation to the type of sail cloth and hours on UV and flogging etc. Much the same as your car tells you when to get it serviced.

We are both working hard, throughout this year with the business and will be going into full production early in 2019.....

All in all, a very good year.

2015. What a year....

2015 was an extremely busy year for Light Black Design.....

We have been very lucky to be carrying on the work we have been doing with Acro Aircraft Seating, helping them develop their next few economy class, lightweight seating. All this work culminates in the first showing of their new Series 6 seats at the Hamburg AirCraft Interiors Expo on April 5th to 7th. Until then, we obviously cant show you these seats but we will of course put a load on our Twitter feed once the press get to see them....

These final release of the seats is an evolution of the seats that were on display last year. 

Since that show, the NPD team (New Products Development) has been formed and now has around 12 engineers working in it, looking at not only this release of the Series 6 seats, but Series 7 & 8 too. Light Black Designs role in the office is to work with all the NPD group and composite suppliers, to engineer these seats to be the most comfortable, reliable, lightweight, low costs seats on the market. And those requirements, in that order, are straight from the mouth of Chris Brady, who is the MD of Acro and whose general amazing ethos is the reason that they are on of the most successful companies in the country. Well done Chris!

Once again, we will keep you up-to-date on these seats as an when they are released, and we wish all at Acro the best of luck for the show.

And for the rest of the week, Dan was lucky enough to have been asked to fill a few gaps in the Design Team at Land Rover BAR, working mainly on their second test boat, T2 Whilst always intended as a temporary role for Dan, whilst they sort out the full numbers in the design office, it was a fantastic team to be part for 11 months and we wish them every success in the future. And if you look at the results from this last weekend in Oman, it looks like they are well on track.

What was fantastic to see was Sir Ben's vision, looking outside of the usual people involved in the Americas cup, and bringing in some of the top people, materials and processes from the other advanced composite industries, such as Motorsport and getting them all to work together to make his team even better. This is always a brave thing to do, and other teams have made it clear they think the best thing to do is only with people who have done the Americas cup. Safe, but maybe limits your possibilities. So, Land Rover BAR now have a fantastic team of people, from a wide range of backgrounds, who will all be able to provide valuable input, based on other projects they have worked on that may just open up some avenues that other teams may not see. Good luck Ben.

So, back to 2016 and we are looking forward to continuing our work with Acro Aircraft Seating as well some other automotive projects, both high and low volume, that seem to be all lining themselves very nicely indeed. And in-between all these projects we Dan will be carrying on the development work of the Flattens, in particular the latest FL015 spec Flatten, for one design boats such as the J70, M20, M24 etc which have all been looking for a horizontal, furling batten that works like the flattens do. Following on from some amazing results in the J70 worlds and Europeans in 2015 where Boats.com used some development FL015's to great success, this is something we cant wait to get back onto. 



And whilst it was fantastic to be other peoples offices for most of 2015, the view from our little office isn't so bad after-all.