2016. So far....

2016 has been another great year working closely with a range of companies in the plane, train and automobile (and a bit of boat...) industries. We've even been giving some advice to a company building a flying car.....

Dan started Light Black Design, just over 7 years ago, with the aim of helping the boat world reduce costs and improve efficiency by passing on some of the advances in composite technologies that the car world had made. That knowledge has now allowed Light Black Design to help almost all possible modes of transport. And the best thing about being involved in so many different projects is that each and every one does something differently and allows us to pass on that information to others.

Starting with Planes.....
Most of 2016 has been with Acro Aircraft Seating again. This year we have been continuing the work we started with the all composite, economy Series 6 seat backs, working closely with the material suppliers and part manufacturers to help them develop the designs to suit the materials and processes. This will be the first all composite seatback that really is cost effective for economy aircraft seats whilst still giving the weight savings possible from using carbon fibre composites, which is so important in the commercial aircraft seating industry.

This seat has been shown all over the world and goes into full production with a world leading airline in the coming months.

We have also been work with Acro on their future Premium Economy seat, Series 7. Once again, this is a seat that has been shown all over the world and has had some amazing reviews. Dan has been helping them with materials and processes as well looking at some of the smaller details in the overall setup of the seat.

To trains.....
Working with Acro lead us to some work with Transcal. Their CEO, Robert Aitken, questioned why Train seats are not as comfortable as Plane seats, especially when one considers the price paid for train tickets compared to the low cost plane tickets that the Acro seats seen on.

With this in mind, and working closely with Factory Design in London, Dan helped engineer this revolutionary Rail seat, that was unveiled at InnoTrans earlier this year.

To Cars....
Having finished working with Ben Ainslie's Americas Cup team in February (that's the boat bit...) Dan was extremely lucky to been given the opportunity to work with an Italian road car company, helping them develop some structural, composite parts that could form the basis of future cars of their production lines.

Alongside this ongoing project, Dan has also been working with a UK manufacturer on an all composite, driver-less taxi for the US markets. Working closely with a world-class team, Dan has generated the conceptual geometry for the chassis and all the BIW (B?) that could form the basis of the prototype vehicles that will be built in the coming months.

As proud as we are of both these projects, we obviously cannot say who we are working with but as soon as the projects go public we will of course show as much as we can.

And finally, to somewhere between cars and planes....
Dan has been contacted by a new European company to help them with some production materials and processing choices for their highly advanced carbon fibre chassis/cockpit. The engineering of this car/plane is being run by an old friend, who Dan worked with at McLaren Automotive.

Although our part in this amazing project is only in its very earliest stages, and there is not much more we can say at the moment, we really look forward to having this chance to work on something that really is out of this world.

Some of the projects we were invoved with in 2013 & early 2014

Continuing on from all the successful projects to date, we continued to work in the aircraft, road car and marine sectors.

Of particular interest was a project with Antony Dodworth where we re-engineered all the geometry (to suit the processing and materials) and engineered the tooling for a carbon fibre bonnet for a mainstream German OEM, that will go into production in the coming years. As usual, we cant say too much about the project, but when it does go into production it will change the whole way composite parts are looked at for mainstream automotive projects.

 We have also been worked on a medium volume composite seat for an Italian OEM, that could be pressed in under 5 minutes. This project involved a huge amount of detailed composite FEA that was run in-house here at Light Black Design.

On the Aircraft side of things, we continued to work with the same supplier as we worked with last year, and helped them optimise various packages and structures, and continue to work with them today. This work is really interesting as taking weight out of any aircraft part is vital, whilst still meeting the stringent regulations that the industry has.

And in the marine sectors most of the work we have done is connected to the Flattens project with Primrose Fry Technologies. This can be seen at PF-Technologies.

We also worked on various projects with Futuremech. This is company run by Humphrey Bunyan, who was instrumental in setting up all of Future Fibres machinery and processes they use in producing some of the most advanced composite masts and rigging in the marine industry. These projects ranges from one-piece, furling, carbon fibre head stay systems to high volume composite parts for the rail industry.

And then, in-between these other marine projects we even looked at a modern version of the Seal 22 (that was designed by Dan's father, Angus Primrose, in the late '60's). Whilst its unlikely that this will ever go into production, it was fun to look at....