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.

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.

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....



what we did for the rest of 2012....

Conscious that we haven't been very good at updating this website, and having spent most of 2012 working with Simon and Oscar, developing our Flattens, for Primrose Fry Technologies, there was little time to get much Light Black Design work done. But having said that, we had quite a few enquiries and now that 2013 has started we will be talking to all those people, who are all looking to improve the efficiency of  their existing and future projects, and starting to work with them all as soon as we can give them our uninterrupted attention.

Whilst we cant discuss the actual names of the people we are talking to, the products we hope to be working with range from composite wheelchairs to lightweight aircraft seats, advanced composite road cars to medium volume Taxis, from Injection moulded Instrument Panel covers to Test Rigs for one of the UK Olympic Hopefuls in the 49er in the 2016 games. All of these projects will allow us to apply the knowledge we have gained over the last 20 years of working with a wide range of advanced materials, from F1 grade carbon fibres to precision machined metallic alloys, where will work with their engineering teams to further optimise all areas of their processes, from Design and Analysis right through to production Tooling and Parts.

some lightweight, low cost composite panels

Following on from the forum Dan sat on at the Yacht Racing Design & Technology Symposium in December 2010 www.yrdts.com, here are some of the details of the lightweight, cored and most importantly, cheap, high performance composite panels that were showed at the conference.

This process is one that was developed specifically for the automotive markets, and is traditionally used for rear parcel shelves and boot floors.

During a previous high volume, low-cost car program Dan worked closely with Bayer to develop the process and materials so that we could produce extremely complex 3D parts, that could be used to form the main panels of the chassis. Whilst we cannot obviously show these panels here, we have some small sample sections that will give you an idea of the type of geometry possible.





The process uses Polyurethane as the matrix (rather than the traditional Epoxies and Polyesters usually used in such products). This has an extremely fast cure profile and can be cured in about 90 seconds if required. In fact, from dry cloth on a roll to a fully cured, net edge part ready to be bonded in the chassis was just over 2 minutes... Where these high volumes are needed (up to about 300,000 parts per year) robots are always used to spray the PUR and can also be used to spray additional Chopped fibres into areas that require additional local reinforcements. Dan worked very closely with a company called Hennecke in Germany www.hennecke.com to ensure that all the possible avenues were explored to produce the most efficient (cost and performance) parts.

Whilst these throughput times are perhaps not appropriate for most marine applications, they may allow the designers to produce extremely lightweight, low cost panels such as doors, floorboards. Where a boat manufacturer may perhaps be producing a reasonable boats in a range, if every boat had the same size doors, and every boat has say 3 doors, then the volumes very quickly reach a number that is ideal for this type of process. In fact, on some super yachts, which can have 150m2 of floorboards which are traditionally made from 25mm ply wood, the weight saving could be over 5kg per m2 (i.e 50% of the baseline boards)

If any further details are required or if you may have a possible application for this process, then please contact us at any time at Info@LightBlackDesign.com