Corbin-Pacific Inc. in Hollister, California, has chopped its time to develop new motorcycle accessories by three-fourths. The gains come from reverse engineering its customized, handmade designs for saddlebags, fairings (windshields)back rests and “smuggler boxes.”

In a few years, said COO Tom Corbin, “this technology could double the size of our business” better known among motorcycle riders as Mike Corbin’s “Workshop of Wizards.”

The system he referred to includes a laser scanner from PERCEPTRON Inc., software from DELCAM, a 7-axis portable coordinate measuring machine (CMM) from ROMER Inc., and a 5-axis router from Diversified Machine Systems (DMS). In total, a $400,000 capital investment installed early in 2006.

“Scanning is 75% faster than the hand methods we had been using,” said Tom Corbin, who is Mike Corbin’s son. “Those methods plus the time needed to find and train designers, have sharply limited our growth.”

Corbin fairings, saddlebags and “smuggler” boxes turn the motorcycle, a physical expression of power and self-assertion, into an elegant piece of mobile art. In doing so it brings together the kinetic and aesthetic sides of the rider’s personality. “In motorcycles, the American passion for cars is multiplied tenfold,” said Tom Corbin. “Bikes are a hobby and a love.”

Adds Marketing Manager Greg Hurley, “this is an enthusiast driven market. It is also an impatient market. Any time Corbin can save in developing new products helps keep customers loyal.” Many ideas come from visiting bikers during Corbin’s annual Fourth of July rally in Hollister and a mid-October rally in Florida. Everything is built by hand and in-house. Total employment is nearly 200. Founded in 1968, the Hollister plant has grown to 82,000 square feet.

The product development process at Hollister starts with choosing several motorcycles from each year’s crop of about 30 new street bikes, off-road bikes and scooters. All the famous names are included: BMW, Harley Davidson, Ducati, Honda, Indian, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Triumph, Vespa, Yamaha and many others.* Corbin also makes motorcycle components such as spoilers and grilles plus furniture that replicates the rear seats of classic cars. There is competition, of course, but Corbin dominates the marketplace.

Working in a studio jammed with motorcycles, eight designers called “shapers” sculpt the left-hand halves of each new product in modeling clay. All Corbin products are axisymmetrical along a vehicle centerline, so only half need be modeled. These are highly stylized and conform artistically to the lines of the specific bike.

Sculpting each new half-model takes shapers about a week. As soon as they finish, model makers duplicate and mirror-image the right-hand halves in a two-part urethane plastic. That completes the model—also known as a master or a plug—from which the molds are made. Prior to reverse engineering, completing the models and making molds took four or more weeks. Now they are done in just one week, three-fourths less time.

Actual parts are rotationally molded in a thermoset polyurethane using hand-laid-up molds. Then parts go to routers that deflash the parts and cut openings for doors, locks and attachment points. After surfaces are smoothed by hand-finishing, the products are assembled, coated, painted and polished till glossy. Corbin uses a rotational molding machine from Rotokinetics (Athens, Georgia) and plans to buy two more.

“These new tools really empower the company to become more imaginative, to create more exquisite, more finely detailed new products,” Tom Corbin said. “The key to any successful company is being involved with the customers and, for us, that means a steady flow of great new designs.” Mike Corbin’s Workshop of Wizards is first and foremost a manufacturer. Every office except that of owner Mike Corbin faces into the factory, even Tom Corbin’s. The studio where products are born is just one door away. It was obvious to Tom Corbin that technology was an avenue of growth.

“But first,” he said, “we had to figure out a way to scale up the business from eight shapers to 32 and make a corresponding increase among the model makers. That would allow us to offer products for all new motorcycle models rated above 300CCs. But we were in a quandary about the risk of hiring that many people.”

Reverse engineering helps develop new products without a heavy front-end investment in skilled workers, Tom Corbin explained. “Initially I can only train one shaper at a time,” he said. “Maybe after a year or two I could build up to training maybe three at a time. That means fully staffing up for big growth could take three to four years. Way too slow, even assuming no one quits,” He continued, “and then I also would have a big reoccurring labor cost. For me as a manufacturer in California, the high cost of labor is the real business issue. That was the justification for our plunge into technology.

“In five or six years this [accessories] department could well double in size,” Tom Corbin added. “We always knew the opportunity was there but we could not capitalize on it without the technology. Saddlebags, fairings and smuggler boxes could be larger and more profitable than our main business,” which is motorcycle saddles. Saddles use entirely different production methods—they are upholstered—and are unaffected (so far) by reverse engineering.

The people responsible for using the reverse engineering and inspection systems are Design Engineering Manager Anthony Printis and Machinist Armando Rodriguez. “The whole system is very intuitive, and it works seamlessly with the rest of the operations,” said Printis. “What we accomplished here in the last few months of 2006 is amazing.”

Reverse engineering also opens the door to moving from accessories into vehicles — three-wheeled motorcycles, trailers and sidecars plus the biggest Corbin dream of all, the three-wheeled Raven urban runabout.

PROBLEM: Getting Design Data from Left to Right

Like all shrewd technology investments, Corbin’s foray into reverse engineering focused on what is repetitive and prone to error, rather than on what is purely creative—that is, on the tasks of the model makers rather than the shapers and other stylists.

The challenge of making the right-hand halves of its models exactly mirror the handmade lefts has always been dimensional. Model makers have used cardboard templates, gages, measuring tape, calipers, files and so forth, none of which is very accurate. Getting this right is critical as fairings and smuggler box halves must mate with no visible seam. Saddlebags are easier as they are sculpted whole. The left and right saddlebags of a set simply need to match rather than mate. In addition, the model makers have to deal with expansion in the ABS plastic and its allowance in the molds. “On a hot summer day, a molded ABS saddlebag can expand by as much as a sixteenth of an inch,” Printis noted.

There was also some tech fear to overcome, which Tom Corbin freely admits. “Before we got into this we did not have a baseline for what to expect. We had a certain amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt,” or FUD. “We felt like we were going into the wilds, into the jungle.”

One reason for the FUD is that Tom Corbin is a keen observer. “The typical pattern of acquiring technology is you buy it and install it and it sits pretty much unused for three months,” he said. “Then the people start to experiment with it, run into snags, stumble, get frustrated, and move on to solve other problems.” He continued, “We couldn’t afford to let that happen. We needed to be able to make it work with the shapers and model makers we had, and any people we could reasonably expect to hire like Anthony [Printis] and Armando [Rodriguez].”

Hand methods also limited:
• The sophistication of saddlebag, fairing and smuggler box designs, holding back the creativity of the shapers and other stylists.
• Diversification away from saddles and accessories into three-wheeled vehicles.

SOLUTION: Reverse-Engineering the Right Halves

Like all technology success, reverse engineering and inspection at Corbin is a synergistic combination of software, hardware and processes. Central to this is data gathering and manipulation done with software from DELCAM plc, including:

• PowerINSPECT to capture 3D surface data whether it’s a scanned “cloud” of hundreds of thousands or even millions of points, or a few hundred to a few thousand touch-probed points.
• CopyCAD to prune the scanned data to what is needed, triangulate every set of three points on a plane (as Stereolithography Tessellation Language or STL files), form the points into meshes, connect the meshes to represent the surface, and re-edit the STL surface if needed.
• PowerSHAPE to turn the STL files into CAD formats such as non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) files and to generate curves and details such as parting lines that are needed for machine-tool programming.
• PowerMILL for programming the 5-axis router. “If you have any background in using these processes,” Printis said, “this is all pretty intuitive.” (Headquartered in Birmingham, UK, DELCAM serves North America from Windsor, Ont., Canada, and Salt Lake City, Utah.)

Hardware for the Corbin system is:
• A ScanWorks® V4i laser scanner from PERCEPTRON, Plymouth, Michigan, and its ScanWorks software for managing the clouds of 3D points gathered by the scanner.
• A 7-axis INFINITE portable CMM from ROMER, Wixom, Michigan, a unit of Hexagon AB. The INFINITE arm has built-in wireless connections (no more tangled cables) and a digital camera to capture setups. The arm has probes as well as a scanner attachment.
• A 5-axis computer numerically controlled (CNC) router from DMS, Gainesville, Texas. Also crucial was product integration and systems support from VIZION Technologies, Burbank, California, the DELCAM distributor.

RESULTS: Slashing Time and Cost, Seamlessly, for Growth

“The whole system is very intuitive,” said Anthony Printis. With four hours of training and only limited knowledge of the process, he and Rodriguez scanned and duplicated three projects in their first six weeks:

• A saddle bag for a Kawasaki.
• A smuggler box for a Honda
• A windshield fairing for a Yamaha.

“Under the old methods, each of these projects would have taken about four weeks,” Printis said, “so this added up to an immediate doubling of model making productivity.” The projects included generating the masters or plugs for molding these parts. A big help, he said were Sanders his team, who have extensive backgrounds in tooling. They walked him through the scanning, reverse engineering and inspection processes and then developed format and procedure models for him to follow. “With the old methods,” Printis continued, “getting center lines of the motorcycles and our accessories, for locating and mounting, and correctly aligning the halves would have taken two weeks. Making sure the halves matched exactly would take two to three weeks more.” These gains are directly reflected in delivery times for the masters and plugs, “by the end of the fourth day, worst case,” Printis said. “Getting the scanner’s point clouds edited into the necessary data for CAM takes a couple of hours. Armando [Rodriguez] needs two to three days to program, rough machine and finish machine. Producing the roto-mold tooling takes one or two days more, including an overnight cure.”

Printis noted that “inspection jobs are quickly set up, despite the complexity of this work. The well-thought-out software interface allows straightforward ease of use, and is a very mature product. It is tightly integrated with the Perceptron’s updated ScanWorks software and the Romer arm and that means less issues for potential data communications problems.”

He continued, “reverse engineering PowerIINSPECT data comes into CopyCAD’s Triangulation Wizard that automatically generates a workable triangular surface mesh, which saves a lot of time consuming. We can manipulate the surface into the appropriate desired surface with Copy CAD’s tools,” Printis added.

“Whether the data is touch-probed points or clouds of points, generating files for machining or design refinements is quick, easy and very intuitive,” he continued. In addition, “Delcam’s CAD software PowerSHAPE is well suited to creating and refining surfaces, as well as solid models, starting with points in 3D space instead of geometry. Over the years I have worked with a lot of CAM packages and, for complex work, PowerMILL is the best.”

When it comes to reverse engineering hardware, “for our reverse engineering needs and my settings, the Perceptron V4i scanner and ScanWorks gathers more than enough data with just a few scans,” Printis noted. “That usually takes just a few minutes. Perceptron’s Laser probe is a line laser scanner sensor, which captures 22,800 points a second at 30 hertz. Depending on user skill in calibration, the system can be accurate to 0.024 mm or 24 microns at 2 Sigma. ScanWorks links to PowerINSPECT seamlessly so, again, no worries.”

Printis also had praise for the ROMER arm. “As the biggest piece of hardware in our portable inspection and reverse engineering system, the INFINITE is a pleasure to use, even after several hours of scanning. Its wireless connections eliminate the problem of tripping over cables. In a busy and confined engineering area, that can be a been a major hassle.”

BENEFITS: They Start with ‘Click’

All the technology went right together, right from the first job, and it keeps getting better as we learn,” Printis said. Tom Corbin calls this “the click” of technology—when it clicks into place with everything else. “That is when the designers and model makers and Anthony and Armando all start learning from each other,” he said. “That’s when they start improving each other’s practices, learning advanced techniques in programming, and learning to troubleshoot.”

The investments in reverse engineering and inspection also help. The words are Tom Corbin’s:
• Grow the business. The accessories division grew 35% in 2006 “even with us needing six months to really get involved with the technology. We believe we will grow the division 50% to 100% in 2007. Eventually, accessories will be bigger, perhaps much bigger, than saddles, which are still our bread and butter.”
• Create opportunities for more new products in smaller markets. “We can now do much shorter runs and still make money. Not long ago we needed thousands of pieces for a good market. Now 300 to 500 pieces is a very attractive to us.”
• Reduce business risks of getting into any specific product line. “Now if something doesn’t work out, we are not stuck with the heavy front-end engineering and tooling costs."
• Explore new styling and design ideas such as a saddlebag molded with Ferrari-like fins. “With the old hand-duplicating methods, we could not have done something with fins like that. Our new level of design flexibility lets us be much more imaginative.”
• Reshape the business whenever the marketplace offers new opportunities. “As an executive I now have more tools to reshape my business.” Taken all together, the technology helps make Corbin part of the new paradigm for American manufacturing—intuitive, creative, market responsive, capable of fast turnarounds, and close to individual customers. Higher-volume, lower-margin work is left to other, less creative organizations.

“This is the type of technology that, until now, a small company could not effectively take advantage of,” Tom Corbin added. “Without this we would not be as competitive as we need to be. When this technology is added to the traditional American manufacturing strengths of ingenuity and enterprise,” he continued, “American companies will again grow more competitive.” He continued, “mid-sized and small businesses need to know about these technologies—that they are affordable, that they work, and that they can really make a difference in competitiveness and new opportunities.

FUTURES: Some Manual Tasks to be Automated

The new Corbin technology also points to “futures” that will eliminate some skills bottlenecks:
• Shaping and clay work will go digital and move to PowerSHAPE, SolidWorks from Dassault Systemes and AutoCAD from Autodesk Inc.
• Model making will be automated with PowerMILL and PowerSHAPE.
• Hand lay-up work of the mold makers will move to the DMS router.

NOTE* Other motorcycle and scooter brands for which Corbin make something are Aprilia, BMC, Buell, Excelsior, KTM, Moto-Guzzi, Norton, Polaris, Universal and Victory.