We made our initial Driver prototype out of mild steel and everyone loved the look of that throughout the campaign. We tried to recreate the finish in aluminium, but we know from your feedback you would have preferred the machined finish of the raw metal. Bringing a full steel big driver to the world would have weighed nearly 1kg! But for the pocket driver we have been able to bring that awesome look of the steel prototype into something you can own, whilst still being useful and near on indestructible! I'm sure they'll be digging them up in hundreds of years and wondering what these shiny little doodads were used for.
The Steel Prototype… What dis?
After we've done our early designs, 3D printed a bunch of variations and are nearing the final design and also before we approach manufactures, we make a final working prototype out of mild steel, brass and Aluminium. This allows us to get a real world take on how the product will work, and also spot manufacturing issues, like having to drill around a corner…
Since this can be a really interesting process to see each part machined by hand, we recorded The Making Of Pocket Driver and have edited it down 6 days (or 54 hours)of turning, milling, filing and fitting into 30 minutes, so you can enjoy the Pocket Driver build supercut!
The real thing will be made on a CNC machine, whereas this is all made the traditional way, manually measuring and gauging each part to drawings.
I hope you enjoy this as much as we did making it!
Inside the Shed
All machined in the MetMo shed by Geoff, who has over 40 years experience in mechanical design and engineering. Geoff started out as a machinist and is a dedicated and award winning model engineer in his spare time (hence the random parts of steam locomotive in the background of these shots) He has been with us since the beginning, bringing these projects to life and often gets stuck into fixing or machining any parts that are damaged or need tweaking during production.
There were some limitations with this prototype and we took some short cuts, mainly the hex drive bit as we didn’t have access to a broach and setting it up on the lathe was going to be a serious operation! So, for this part we made a bit of a short cut and cut down a standard drive bit extender with the magnet built in. This was purely for prototyping purposes.
Also, just for prototyping to save ourselves some pain with hours of milling, we used aluminium for the handle on this one, but that will be stainless steel in the full steel production unit.
We hope you enjoy watching a Pocket Driver come to life!
