Designed together

Power and performance

A high-powered supercar is perfection on wheels. The carbon fibre body of a Lamborghini Aventador or an Aston Martin 177 isn’t just a masterpiece of design; it pushes manufacturing technology to the limit.

Matchstick-thin carbon fibre body panels make new levels of performance possible. But how do you fasten them in place without using a rivet or drilling a hole?

We came up with a new way to precision-fix bigHeads onto the super-thin carbon fibre products designed by our clients. We do it with specialist adhesives. The results are secure, reliable and completely invisible.

Our solution is perfect for making rapid prototypes and bespoke designs. But it also scales efficiently into mass production.

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Perfect every time

It’s hard to make something perfect. But manufacturing perfection in mass production is another challenge entirely.

Jaguar Land Rover wanted to fix rubber tread onto a metal running board in a way that would be secure but invisible. Ideal job for a bigHead.

But our client – a Tier 1 supplier – needed high volume production runs, without any dips in quality, compromises on design, or complications to its automated production process.

We worked with our client to ensure its robots could insert bigHeads into their injection-moulding tool – hour after hour, day after day. The bigHeads are invisible and secure. They do their job perfectly – every time.

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Silent beauty

Those annoying little rattles you hear in the car sometimes? You don’t get that with a Bentley. Ever. That’s in part because the door panels and central consoles are held securely in place by bigHead fasteners.

Locking down this kind of interior fitting is the kind of thing we’re used to. The hard part was working out how to do it efficiently. And how to meet the sky-high quality standards that Bentley owners demand.

We partnered with Bentley’s Tier 1 supplier to find an answer. Together we designed a one-step manufacturing process that embeds the bigHeads in the composite moulded part. No secondary operations. Completely discrete and ready for final assembly. It’s a simple idea, beautifully delivered.

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Strong and safe

Concrete cladding can weigh a ton. And if fixed in place with traditional steel anchors it’s a slow and inefficient process. So when our client won a contract to clad a high profile building in central London, we worked with them to design a better way.

Our client wanted to use Glass Reinforced Concrete (GRC) panels. They are thin and light, but still need secure mechanical fixings. Our solution was to embed bigHeads into the panels during the manufacturing process.

The solution we designed with our client means the bigHeads are always in exactly the right position. So on-site assembly is quick and easy. And the data we shared about our process enabled our client to meet the necessary accreditations.

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Clearly better

A storm-battered oil rig miles from shore. Out here, where the weather is extreme, a lighting failure can be a matter of life and death. Everything must be designed and engineered to the highest standards possible.

Our client makes the IP-rated lights that guide people safely around a rig. They work brilliantly. But there was one problem: the fasteners used to fix the light into position relied on a hole drilled through its waterproof casing – this introduced the risk of a short-circuit.

We worked with our client to find a better answer. We looked at their manufacturing process as well as their product design. By embedding bigHeads into the waterproof casing that housed the light, we took away the need for those leaky holes. And by integrating bigHeads into the sheet moulded compound (SMC) process, we created a simpler one-step manufacturing process that saved them time and money.

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Above the clouds

A power-generating wind turbine 100 metres above the ground. Up here, you don’t want to be struggling to open a maintenance hatch.

When Siemens decided to make its turbine housings out of composite materials, rather than metal, they gave us a challenge: Could we find a safer and quicker way to fix the access panels in place?

It took a lot of collaboration, prototyping and extreme testing to meet some of the toughest performance criteria we’ve ever worked with. Eventually, we found a way to integrate bigHeads into composite panels and over-mould them with an insulation layer. This keeps them safe from lightning strikes, and matches the colour of the composite housing.

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