The Diamond

grabcad

From all of my submissions for this challenge, this is by far my favourite. As with all my other designs, I wanted to keep things simple, for both manufacture and use and I think this ticks all the boxes. I came up with a rough concept, worked out basically how it could be made, then developed it from a manufacturing perspective. The company I currently work for uses a lot of sheet metal to form catering product. From this, I knew a standard sheet metal size is 2500mm x 1250mm (aprox. 8ft x 4ft). I then calculated what lengths I'd need to create the shape I wanted, allowing for the bends and the length of the kitchen roll. I then worked out an aesthetically pleasing width, as well as a width which would provide good overall stability in the formed product. From this I tessellated the 'diamond' shape onto the 8x4 sheet and then tweaked the dimensions to ensure maximum usage from the metal sheet. I have included a few images of how the diamonds would fit onto a sheet to make 22 products from a single sheet. They could be laser or CNC cut to make the basic profile, then bent into the overall shape to produce an elegant, attractive kitchen roll holder. The basic manufacturing processes involved will keep costs to a minimum, meaning the customer can have a special Umbra product for a small price. In terms of use, the kitchen roll is held by the solid chrome plated spindle, which slots through a hole in the top of the diamond form and sits comfortably in the corresponding hole in the base. I truly believe this design would be a great addition to the Umbra catalogue and fulfils all the competition criteria.