Designing the Fling

For the past couple of weeks, Dave and I have been working on what we think is a pretty cool idea. We call it the Carbon Fling...

It all started with one of our customers that is interested in getting some projects on Kick Starter, which is a pretty cool website that allows users to create "projects" where they post an idea and request funding to make it happen. That funding can be to purchase tooling, buy materials, or whatever, as long as a "reward" is provided. In essence, people can pre-order a product or service by pledging some money to the project. If the money isn't raised, no money trades hands. If the necessary money is raised, then the project gets funded and there are bunch of pre-orders to get it off the ground. It's a great idea!

After seeing some of the ideas that other people are doing, we decided to create our own little bitof carbon eye candy for a desk that is in the range that a mere mortal can afford. Combining the incredible properties of carbon with an old-school catapult, we developed a simple, but elegant desktop catapult made entirely out of carbon fiber.

Here is a sketch in SolidWorks of the design... It went through a few iterations to get there, but we ended up with a simple design with only two parts to it.