S.R. Smith elected to base the runway of the new Typhoon slide on that of an existing slide, the Rogue, that had already passed Consumer Product Safety Commission review. The company specified that the finished product meet a predetermined target manufactured cost and that it match the look and feel of the company's successful TurboTwister slide.

The MAGNET Product Design & Development team managed the Typhoon design project through the concept development, mechanical engineering and model build and testing phases. Afterwards, MAGNET PDD acted as a part-time consultant, providing engineering support for the later phases: pattern and mold tooling, engineering sampling run, and production start.

"There were two main challenges," says Michael Keller, senior product design engineer for MAGNET. "First, there are many safety requirements for pool slides that need to be met to satisfy the CPSC. Second, when molding such large and complex parts, we had to take into account varying shrinkage factors in different areas so that there wouldn't be any gaps between the finished parts."

The MAGNET PDD team arranged the laser scanning of the runway surface of the Rogue slide and imported that data into Pro-E and used it to generate a functional 3-D computer model that met safety and aesthetic requirements. After evolving the new ladder design, MAGNET created a 1/10 scale model of the conceptual slide with its fusion deposition machine (FDM).

"Having something in three dimensions was very useful, especially to demonstrate the concept to people who aren't used to interpreting drawings,"says Svendsen. "I've also found that many things get overlooked in the CAD files. In three dimensions you can see immediately that something won't work and needs to be changed before we go to the mold stage."