Creating the "American design" for motorcycle aficionados: nowadays, behind even the most meticulously hand-crafted machine, is some high-tech design software

Automotive Design & Production, March, 2005 by Lawrence S. Gould

"There's a true American design. We've just gotten away from it," says Brian Case, president and CEO of Foraxis Design Solutions, LLC, (Pittsburgh; www.foraxis.com), a three-year-old industrial design firm, speaking about working with Confederate Motor Co. (New Orleans; www.confederate.com). They're working to capture "true American design" for the ultimate American machine--an American motorcycle. But not just any American motorcycle. It's Confederate's latest bike: the Wraith. Expected to sell for under $50,000, the Wraith weighs in at under 400 lb. and is powered by a 91-in. (3) engine that delivers 120 hp to the rear wheel. The prototype Wraith is brutally fast and handles beautifully. Confederate is targeting the Wraith, the first of which is scheduled for delivery October 31, 2005, for street riding. However, between the prototype and the finished street model, some work needed to be done.

THE IDEAL MOTORCYCLE

Founded in 1991, Confederate is a small manufacturer of luxury, handcrafted motorcycles. "Handcrafted" means meticulously machined, fabricated, and assembled--in batches of five or less at the company's New Orleans location. "Handcrafted connotes that the person who builds your motorcycle is a happy person. The motorcycle is a part of that person," says Matt Chambers, Confederate's chairman. As a result, these machines "have a life force." The Wraith has neither excess ornamentation nor flashy paint schemes. It is not tricked out with stylish pictures of a dragon eating a butterfly or some other skinhead-prison-looking graphic representing thug life. The Wraith, says Chambers, is essentially a "stripped down example of acute minimalism." The bike's beauty comes from its stark, minimalist form.

JT Nesbitt, Confederate's chief designer, sees his work here on earth as, "if nothing else, to make a bridge between conceptual modernism--fine art--and vehicle design." Nesbitt is steeped in the world of fine arts; his degree is in sculpture. "I think it is a good world because it's probably more enduring."

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Talking with Nesbitt soon leads to a discussion about the struggle between art and industrial design. He says that when talking of what they do, "It's real easy to get the industrial design people to say that's a 'sculptural thing.' It's quite another thing to get sculptors to say 'that motorcycle is a sculptural thing.' It doesn't go both ways." Nesbitt's design philosophy, even at the concept stage, is causing quite a stir in the motorcycle world. In December 2004, the Motorcycle Design Association in France awarded the Wraith second place in the Concept Bike Category. However, Nesbitt felt it needed more refinement. For instance, he wanted to move the weight of the Wraith forward, while maintaining its fluid design and without significantly increasing the cost of production. Nesbitt took the concept bike to an industrial design conference in Pittsburgh last May. There, by chance, he met Case. They talked. Soon after, they agreed to have Foraxis help Confederate refine the Wraith and see it through to production.

The serendipity didn't stop there because Case immediately had a problem: Foraxis didn't own a CAD package. Neither did Confederate. All of Confederate's design work was done by a third-party design/engineering firm on Autodesk AutoCAD v14, The industrial design conference wound up being a good place to search for a CAD system. Case discovered thinkiD from think3, Inc. (Cincinnati, OH; www.think3.com). The price was right--about $4,500. Even better, think3 offered free and personalized training, which eventually proved "awesome," says Case. Foraxis was able to master thinkiD in about two weeks and, continues Case, it enabled him to do this project.

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THE CAD SOFTWARE

The think3 9.0 product suite consists of three products: thinkdesign, thinkteam, and thinkiD. thinkdesign is a parametric solid modeler that lets designers work with data from virtually any design source and maintain data currency and integrity between design systems through bidirectional data translators. thinkteam is a product data management (PDM) system fully integrated with the other two products, yielding 2D/3D/PDM functionality in a single design environment. It's that last product, thinkiD, that Foraxis glommed onto for creating complex, interesting shape-based designs--shapes so complicated or so important that they themselves "make" the product. Such as a motorcycle.

think3 is one of the first hybrid modeling kernels that lets designers work in 2D and 3D, and work on wire frame, surface, and solids models--everything--in the creation of complex shapes. Foraxis can instantly view 3D models while designing and redesigning the 2D CAD files or the 3D solid models.

Case likes that thinkiD lets him and his team perform multiple operations at the same time. For example, Case can just drag-and-drop designs into a part library. Then, to reuse that part, he only has to drag that design onto the thinkiD workspace. The software knows what plane the user is working on and automatically snaps the dragged-in design to the right point.