Powerbrace is the premier manufacturer of heavy-duty door securement for cargo that is shipped by trailer or container. They offer quality lockrods and hinges, plus special cargo door security products and accessories for trailer/container manufacture and repair.

Powerbrace’s improvement teams have consistently developed innovative solutions for providing better products to their customers.  Balancing design efficiency with technical output demands precision design engineering.

“There is a real ‘touch and feel’ element to our business,” notes Brian Senn of Powerbrace Corporation. “We have made mock-ups of product assemblies using a combination of standard and 3-D printed parts to demonstrate the operation, size, and look of proposed products. This ‘touchy-feely’ feature leads to great discussions with the customer, discussions which a drawing would rarely lead to."

- Brian Senn, Powerbrace Corporation

Customer demands often compress design phases, and deadlines are even tougher with unusual custom design solutions.  As a result, the Powerbrace team is left with tight timelines to produce prototypes, test and project-manage production, and deliver the final product on time and on budget.  Before integrating the Dimension 3D Printer into their development process, the team used in-house steel and outsourced machine shops for rapid prototyping – which often consumed between seven to ten days of valuable and already limited time.

The Powerbrace design team looked for a quick, effective, and above all, high-quality solution for developing functional 3D models.  They demanded ease-of-use, replication that captured the quality of their designs and, most importantly, a strong output material that would not fracture, distort or require too much refining and cleaning up prior to fitting.

The Powerbrace design team agrees their Dimension 3D printer is simple and reliable to use.  As Brian Senn explains:

“The Dimension 3D printer allows us to communicate with the customer better by having the product prototype at hand.  It has also reduced the cost to make concept models so there is less outside machine shop work to do.  We have required fewer revisions to new production tooling because they were reviewed internally and by customers.  Handing a customer a concept part is much better than a CAD rendering or a drawing.”

Dimension 3D printing can help you quickly perfect your designs and cut weeks from your development schedule.  Its ability to produce quick, inexpensive models made of ABS plastic allows designers to efficiently model multiple concepts right from their desktop.