There have been occasions when a customer initially believed their product was finished, and then ended up bringing it to our facility after discovering serious defects. One of our customers, who manufactures consumer products, asked us to help him with a golf cart wheel he had thought was finished. The wheel had been designed and molded by one of our competitors, but there was a design flaw that would cause the wheel to become unstable and warp when the pressure of the cart came down on it. This, unfortunately, caused it to fail in testing.

Our engineering staff performed their own stress analysis on the wheel, to determine how to repair the flaw in the wheel. Then we realized that wheel only needed a rubbery tire along the outside. The urethane material that we used to make the tire was cheap as well as tough, so when our tire was applied to the wheel it passed in testing.

Even though we had no idea what the potential sales volume of this product was we found a cost effective way to make the wheel pass in stress testing. This earned us a new consumer products relationship, and allowed the customer to sell his product with few modifications from his original idea.