Fig. 1 Picture of Completed Cover	Fig. 2 Picture of Track on side panel	Fig. 3 Completed Prototype

Summary:

The design project consisted of work done with Total Innovative Manufacturing.  T.I.M. is a new company local to Holland, MI.  They work with recycled plastic bottles that are compressed to create a material used in the office furniture industry.  The flexibility of the material can be varied by the amount of material and the compression associated with that amount.  T.I.M produced a piece of this material that had the appearance of a roll top desk.  The material was also flexible enough to translate up and down a curved path.  A meeting with the owner of T.I.M., Ken Assink, illustrated his idea of creating a cover to a typical office cabinet with the outward appearance of a roll top desk.  The design problem that was generated from this meeting included assembling this cover to the existing office cabinet that allowed it to be operational.

Once the design problem was in hand the next step involved finding means to accomplish what Ken had desired.  The first step was to set out the requirements that were found.  The desired product had to translate up and down in a smooth manner and maintain capacity as well as include an appealing appearance.  Research was done on the existing office cabinets and other products that translate along an axis.  It was found that the most applicable comparison was with the roll top desk.  This was also the most useful benchmark during the design process.  There were several design concepts that were considered once the design requirements were set.  These design concepts included ideas such as stiffeners to keep the material from bending as well as different ideas for connections to the track.

The next step was to generate a final design idea from the design concepts.  As it turns out the final design idea came as a hybrid of the several concepts that had been considered earlier.  At the time it was thought that the design idea had been set but there turned out to be a few more changes coming in the near future.  A later meeting revealed that Ken was able to make the material with a higher density that allowed the concept of stiffeners to be dropped.  That didn't last to long either when it was found during the prototype phase that the ends of the cover had a tendency to bend outward.  Metal rods were added the end of the material to prevent this from happening.  The handle on the final product turned out to be a standard kitchen drawer handle.  Extrusions were picked from Outwater Catalog to be the caps on all four sides of the cover.  The side extrusions were picked to be flexible as well as square in shape to better fit the track.  The end caps on the other hand were picked to be round so that they would be more appealing to the customer.  The completed cover can been seen in the figure 1.

The track consisted of a plastic material that was cut to size and then attached with screws to each side panel.  There was a top and bottom piece on each side to compensate for the resting weight of the material and the force applied during operation.  The track was also in place to help guide the translation of the cover.  This path of the track is important as to maintain the capacity of the cabinet that was a necessity of the design requirements.  A side view of the track can be seen in the figure 2.

Overall the project created an office cabinet with the look of a roll top desk.  This turned out to be both functional as well as appealing in appearance to the customer.  The combination of the two resulted in a final prototype that can be seen below in figure 3.