Bike Helmet Foam for your Decent
The Decent Espresso Machine comes to you in its own suitcase. It's cradled inside with custom-cut foam, and the suitcase sports 4 wheels and a handle. This protects it on its way to you, but also when/if you want to travel with your Decent.
We're working on a new design for the inside. When we made the DE1XL foam inside the suitcase, we redesigned that, and we managed to substantially reduce the likelihood of damage to the DE1 during shipping. With the older foam, 6.7% of machines suffer some sort of shipping damage, whereas 2.3% of DE1XL suffer shipping damage.
But, we think we can do better.
We were originally inspired by the precision moulded EPP foam parts used on the inside of cars by Knauf Automotive https://knaufautomotive.com/products/epp-and-eps-components/
Besides moving the parts around inside the suitcase, we're also switching to a high end foam that is used for bike helmets and inside cars.
The mould cost for this is eye wateringly expensive, at USD$24,000, so we have to get the design right the first time. At the moment, we're having CNC machines (essentially robots with a drill) carve out prototypes we can test, out of big blocks. Each test run costs about USD$1000, so this is not cheap either, but it's the only way.
We still have a lot of work, before this new design is ready to be inside suitcases shipping to customers. Because this foam is so much stronger, we've found it much more difficult to get the machine in, as the foam does not yield. And the suitcase is much more difficult to close as well. We have to solve these engineering problems before we can proceed.
Once we're finished, each suitcase will have foam that costs about USD$20 per suitcase to make, which is a small price to pay, if we can succeed at our goal of preventing most damage to your Decent during its time with shipping companies.
The new foam will be backward compatible with the existing suitcases, so people can upgrade. However, this foam won't compress, and because of COVID, shipping such large foam will be expensive, so I don't know that it'll be affordable for existing people to get it.
Updated 2021/08/18