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Background
Have you ever noticed those plastic black boxes you see on trailers, large equipment and boats that hold batteries in them? Not really? Well, maybe only if you have needed to buy one at some point. They're everywhere and nobody notices them. They're kind of non-discrete and they do their job well.
If you do happen to own one of these then there's a good chance it was made by NOCO. These boxes have been around for a while and they're made right here in the USA. In fact they've been around for so long our tooling was reaching end of life. It had been so long that we were going to have to remodel the boxes in CAD, so it was decided to do a redesign.
Redesign
For the most part the redesign was straight forward, just needed to apply our current design style to the box. Slap a big X on the top, smooth out all the edges, and make sure the company logo is prominent.
Sorting through the years of reviews for the old design we noticed one of the only complaints people had was the tab that locked the lid down was too secure, so much that it could be difficult to remove the lid. To improve we would need to make the lid just as reliable and secure, but also easier to remove when you want to take it off.
Original Box tab.
The old design was a tab that slide through a loop and snapped in. The biggest decision was to remove that loop and just have the lid hug the base.
Buckle Design
The original box was shipped with a strap that had a generic buckle. Nothing fancy, but just like the original box: it did the job. NOCO has embraced a design language since the original boxes were designed. We're not just utilitarian, we're sleek.
An initial custom design was made and it was quickly discovered to need a lot of work.
Several iterations were made before a new redesign was made to match closer to tried and true buckle designs.
Original Box with Buckle & Strap.
Left: Initial redesign. Right: Iterative design.
With the initial design we thought the problem was the teeth just weren't gripping enough. I "sharpened" the teeth and added them to both sides, then raised the teeth. After several iterations it was determined we needed the extra tension and pressure points. Going back to a more classic design still took several iterations before getting it right.
One of our problems was the difference of 3D printed parts and injected molded parts. 3D printed teeth would be sharper than their injected molded counterparts. There were a couple times that we thought we nailed the design but when we received a tooled part it didn't perform as great as the 3D printed prototype did.
Final Design.
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