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M26 Studio |
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Agri-Fab Smart Sweep – Lawn Sweeper Working closely with the Agri-Fab team, Make 26 Inc. redesigned and re-engineered the impressive new Smart Sweep lawn sweeper, so innovative that it is designed to pick up anything in its path - including several U.S. patents for everything from the hitch design to the dumping mechanism and the collapsible easy-store design.
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Make 26 found that Agri-Fab’s lawn sweeper line, once the dominant product in the market, was losing market share for at least two reasons: they were competing on price against domestic competitors who were all building basically the same sweeper, and Agri-Fab had several patents that had expired; the company was now faced with new competition from knock-offs from overseas manufacturers who were selling directly to U.S. retailers. Our ultimate goal for this project was to reinvent the lawn sweeper – literally from the ground up.
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We ran through user scenarios that addressed sweeping, dumping, cleaning, and storage. Opportunities were discovered along the way – the assembly was complicated, emptying the hopper while fully loaded was difficult, the brush height adjustment was awkward, plus the sweeper unit was large and required ample room to store. |
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Our design team identified and addressed both User Interactive and Non-User Interactive features: Both are equally important to the user experience, and are addressed equally to insure the success of the project.
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Working with Agri-Fab, we identified parts and materials that were high cost in order to discover ways to reduce the overall manufacturing cost. |
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| In order to test the concepts that we had generated, we built a full sized, functional test hopper mechanism in the Make 26 shop. This device was designed to be easily modified—we were able to evaluate a variety of pull levers, fulcrum locations, hopper displacements and plenum configurations designed to limit hopper size when picking up heavier grass clippings. |
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| Final prototypes were created and subsequently tested for 80 hrs on real grass and leaves. |
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| The completely redesigned hopper mechanism and bag allows for larger payloads and easier dumping. |
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| Make 26 designed a new hitch mechanism that allows the sweeper to be offset from the tractor for effective, simultaneous mowing/sweeping. This patented system allows the mechanism to fold for easy storage. |
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| We moved the brush assembly in front of the wheel/axle so that the height adjustment would be independent of the frame/housing. This allows for an easy, one handed brush height adjustment. |
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| One of Agri-Fab’s primary goals for this project was to re-establish their brand in the market. Make 26 was redesigning one of Agri-Fab’s flagship products, and we worked with the Agri-Fab team to create and establish a new aesthetic and visual brand language. This VBL was applied across an entire new line. |
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| Agri-Fab is also an OEM supplier to other brands, so our team created color schemes that would work with each of the brands. |
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| Virtually every part of this new sweeper was redesigned by Make 26. This ground up restructuring allowed us to arrive at a vastly superior product. The redesign included: • reducing the overall number of parts • simplifying the assembly • cutting costs while adding functionality • creating patentable new features • improving the drive mechanism • differentiating the aesthetics from the competition • differentiating the functionality from the competition • providing greater ease of use |
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