This aims to demonstrate the benefits for designers to work closely with them from their first ideas and concepts, optimising product development, production, quality and performance when using bigHeads for fastening all types of composite materials and components.
From the home page (www.bighead.co.uk), the ‘Designed Together’ section is a detailed overview with case studies that look to demonstrate how bigHead meets its customers’ challenges, with collaboration from prototyping to production and beyond, creating, developing, refining and optimising lightweight composite designs by working together.
The section reflects bigHead’s conviction that great design is a collaborative ‘engineer-to-engineer’ process and that lightweighting and new materials, combined with novel manufacturing and fastening techniques, are redefining the composites landscape.
“The best fastener designs are always developed early in the design process,” says Phil James, bigHead’s technical director, who believes that there is a perfect solution to every design and engineering challenge. “We value working together – inside the company, with our suppliers and especially with our customers.”
Three other resource sections are also selectable from the home page. The ‘tecHub’ section informs the designer about composite production processes for embedded, moulded-in and surface bonded bigheads, in addition to providing supporting engineering documents, including tensile and torque performance data, as well as application downloads, drawing requests and useful FAQs. For existing users and those who know what they need from the start, ‘The original bigHead’ section catalogues the full standard range of over 400 mild steel and 316 stainless steel bigHeads in an intuitive four-step selection process. Also, ‘engineered to order’ pages illustrate the possibilities for customised fasteners and the collaborative approach. The fourth section, ‘Discover bigHead’ reflects history, culture, quality and a customer list that represents leading names in industries that include automotive, marine, transportation, construction, aerospace, energy and more.
bigHead has also recently relocated to a new purpose-built factory in Verwood, Dorset, doubling the manufacturing and design capability of its previous facility.