Through the Interface

A few weeks ago a colleague – and keen mountain biker – from the Neuchatel office, Nicolas Barras, pointed me at a video created by one of his favourite local brands, SCOTT Sports, showing their goggle manufacturing process. Nicolas – a huge SCOTT fan – was curious about their use of design software.

 

 

Watching the video with Nicolas, I could see Autodesk Inventor being used for their tooling design at around the 43s mark. This made me curious, too: I wondered whether it was also used to design the goggles, themselves. SCOTT is located at Givisiez, near Fribourg (it's about 45km from the Autodesk office in Neuchatel), so I decided to get in touch with SCOTT to find out more.

Ryan Bloodworth is the Lead 3D Digital Designer at SCOTT in Givisiez and was kind enough to get on the phone to tell me about SCOTT Sports. He explained a bit about SCOTT's history in Switzerland, as well as providing some information about their use of design software.

I have a strong mental association between SCOTT and the United States; after all, the label SCOTT USA is still commonly found on mountain bikes and ski equipment. It turns out the company is now Swiss owned, having been through a series of management buy-outs over the last couple of decades. You can find out more from the company's history page.

SCOTT has a few hundred employees at their Givisiez site: Ryan explained that their production happens elsewhere, however. In terms of the design work – for goggles, helmets and protection – SCOTT uses Autodesk Alias exclusively for all design and sketch modelling through to A surface (and sometimes B) production modelling. Designs are then handed over to engineering for their work in Pro-Engineer, however they never modify the base surfaces.

On the production side of things, it's clear they're using Autodesk Inventor, at least for mold design for their goggles.

SCOTT kindly provided some images of their goggle production process, which I've included below. I assume the shots were taken at their factory in Austria, as if you look closely they're using German-language Inventor. 🙂

Goggle frames are injection molded:

Once molded, goggle frames sometimes have patterns applied. I used to have some tiger-patterned snowboarding goggles, so I rather like these ones. 🙂

That's a quick look at frames, now for the lenses… which are CNC-milled.

And you really can't have goggles without a strap…

For more information on the process, be sure to check out this page on the SCOTT Sports web-site.

Now that you're in the mood – and Winter Is Coming (if it hasn't arrived already, where you are) – here's another SCOTT video from their "No Shortcuts" campaign. I really can't wait to hit the slopes, now!

 

 

A big thank you to Ryan, Sylvain Fauvel and Julien Thiery for providing information about SCOTT Sports. Keep up the great work!