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TaylorCustom Product Development

The process of making the products for TaylorCustom has changed a lot over the years! In the beginning, I would make pencil sketches, and transfer them to a hard green wax used by jewelers, which I would then spend endless hours whittling. Making things in real life is a lot less forgiving than doing the same work with CAD tools. Many of my pieces went through several iterations before I achieved a satisfactory result... and yet other pieces never made it.

Read the explanatory captions of the photos below to learn more about the process. This page gives an in-depth account of the creation of one of my more complex items, the anatomical eye with optics, and this page describes my transition to using high-tech tools for model making.

sketches-01

In preparation for carving my earliest items I made these sketches. On some you can see the grid I drew in order to transfer the designs to the wax.

reject-wax-carvings

Here is a big box of wax carvings that didn't make the grade. Each one represents many hours , days, etc. of painstaking whittling!

Mani-stone-carvings

Making things in real life is a lot less forgiving than doing the same work with CAD tools. I went through several iterations before I got a satisfactory mani-stone.

heart-locket-development

The heart was my first locket-style item. Items from left to right are: 1) hand-carved heart keychain. 2) pewter casting of hand-carved heart (with enlarged loop). 3) duplicate pink waxes of the first heart made with a traditional Jewlers rubber injection mold (in upper left). I dropped this effort partway through. 4) The actual heart locket that I made years later using CAD and 3d printing.

alvin-and-atlantis

The submarine on the left was to be my first CAD-only design, but in the end I wound up carving the piece by hand. Later, when it came time to make the sub's mother ship (with all of its little portholes etc., I got partway into carving it, and decided that it was time to try the CAD way... and so the ship on the right is my first computer generated piece.

atlantis-models

The process of transitioning from hand-carving to CAD-modeling was fraught with difficulties... The large ship in the back is a 3d print in which I forgot to specify metric units!

mech-design-sample-01

For years, I have done contract design work using several CAD packages, experience that came in handy as the locket-style pieces became increasingly complex!

hingeAssortment-02-adj

Since my first locket style item (the heart locket introduced in 2010), I have used a lot of variations on the design of the hinge.

casting01_photosilver-02

One technical issue encountered in the early days of 3d prints, was the inability to withstand the vulcanized rubber molding process.

anatomical-eye-locket-21

Click on the link below to see the in-depth account of the creation of one of my more complex pieces, the Anatomical Eye Keychain.

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