Next, a review of the envelope or real estate to work with, which will include part orientation, surrounding components, and items to contend with. This will normally provide or identify a basic shape of the application. Now its time to bring all this brainstorming to some sort of form or shape via a product rendering for drafting to work with some basic dimensions. From here, a variety of second step to confirm your start can be taken: models, various analysis packages (applying loads to confirm application data info), prototype development, and developmental or trial testing are also in order.
This is normally referred to as a 'Black Box' approach. More than often we do not have the extent of information because our customer does not know, and we have to figure majority of this out together. In this case, C-I will work with our customers to conceptualize, design and development a product based on some general knowledge of the application and its environment.

C-I's primarily designs using parametric solid modeling to define and tweak a parts geometries. We house a variety of Computer Aided Design seats that allow our designers no longer have to approximate, as part of the product definition process. Parametric models allow for very fast design changes without geometry recreation. This also assists in the design preparation for FEA or other application analysis programs.

Our CAD Design Center have a long history of providing design expertise to the automotive, industrial and Specialty OEM's. We offer stand design and development work with each program, we also can provide:

• Product design
• Tool design
• Machine design
• Special equipment design

Our newest design package, AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop, is used for mold as well as part design. In addition, we have computer aided mold flow modeling programs allow us to model mold gates and runners on the computer, saving a significant amount of time and unnecessary expense.

Design Software:

• Unigraphics 18
• AutoCAD 14
• Catia-CADCAM Solutions V5
• Solid Works
• AutoDesk Inventor
• AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop 2004
• Hyperform 3.2
• ANSYS 5.5
• Dyna3D 950

C-I also offers our valued customers our design, test and prototyping facilities, as well as our materials catalogue. Where we do not support some basic materials testing or high load fatigue (compounded angle hydraulic testing) we will contract an A2LA laboratory to support these low frequency test items.