Earlier this year, Light Black Design were contracted by Hexagon Studio to do the full Body Engineering of the critical sections for the exterior panels of their Taxi Project, intended for worldwide production in 2012.
As we posted in January, this project was intended as a replacement for the NY Cabs. Whilst it is unfortunate that they were beaten at the final-post by Nissan, Hexagon Studio (and their parent company Karsan) took note of all the positive support for their taxi, and made a very quick decision to produce the vehicle for a range of alternative customers.
Whilst the specific details of this project are confidential at this point in time, what we can say is that the first stage of the project for Light Black Design involved working closely with the Hexagon Studio's principal engineers, designers and manufacturers, where we were able to offer our vast knowledge of working with a large range of lightweight materials, to help their engineers select the most appropriate materials and processing methods for the Exterior Panels of the vehicle.
Following this initial investigation we have been busy generating extremely detailed documents that will form the principal guidelines for our clients engineers to fully define all the exterior panels and the associated fixing methodology to fit the panels to the BIW (Body in White).
Alongside this engineering ssection of the project, we have also written a selection of "How to..." guides which will give all their engineers a range of handbooks that will enable them all to design and engineer theses type of panel in the future, in materials that they might not have traditionally used in the past.
All this work is being done both in 2D and 3D formats, using Catia V5
