At first, Protolabs and All Design Lab wished to indicate that you could possibly make a tennis racket with 3D-printed steel. As soon as the thing emerged the creators started to suppose they could have taken the normal racket into the long run.
Design and branding studio, All Design Lab partnered with Protolabs to fabricate Hìtëkw, a custom-designed tennis racket idea. The racket’s body was conceptualized to interrupt the mildew of conventional tennis racket design by utilizing direct steel laser sintering (DMLS) 3D printing.
Picture by Protolabs
Feels like experiment, however then it discovered buy within the tennis world. “The Hìtëkw tennis racket began purely conceptual. Then we obtained curiosity from professional and semi-pro gamers,” Andrew Lim, co-founder of All Design Lab, advised Design Information. Now we’re trying to find manufacturing companions to assist convey this concept to life. We love how small concepts develop into improvements that would disrupt the market.”
Custom Meets the New
Lim and his co-founder, Anthony Lopez had by no means created an idea for sporting gear. But the 2022 US Open tennis event going down lower than 15 miles from their studio. They have been impressed to provide a tennis racket a shot. As they designed the racket, they determined to make it an ode to the Lenape Native American tribe, whose members stretched throughout the Northeastern United States through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “We have been impressed by the folks that belonged to that area and imagery of merchandise they used to make out of timber and pure supplies native to the land,” Lopez defined that the Hìtëkw’s intricate curling branch-inspired design on the racket’s deal with was initially conceptualized with the assistance of AI and generative design, however Lopez iterated completely different variations of it from there. “We wished Hìtëkw to disrupt the imagery of the normal tennis racket,” stated Lopez.
From Idea to Prototype
Apart from aesthetics, practicality needed to come into play for the idea. In any case, somebody would have to have the ability to simply maintain and play with the tennis racket. The sheer idea and design of Hìtëkw was garnering lots of media curiosity, so Lim and Lopez determined to show to 3D printing to convey it into actuality. “Our imaginative and prescient for the Hìtëkw tennis racket is to display how stepping past conventional boundaries can result in modern design,” stated Lim. “We imagine that difficult the standard limits of creativity makes it attainable to discover new and thrilling potentialities.”
As the thought developed, it turned clear to Lim and Lopez that it could be practically not possible to convey Hìtëkw to life through CNC machining or injection molding, as a result of design’s intricate and complicated nature. Protolabs’ steel 3D printing service turned the clear know-how of alternative greatest suited to convey its natural geometry to life.
Hìtëkw’s 2024 Heads Out for a World Tour
With a top of greater than 26 inches, the Hìtëkw is on the bigger finish for a DMLS-printed half. To supply it, Protolabs utilized two GE Additive X Line printers able to producing steel elements at a big scale in both aluminum in Inconel. The All Design Lab staff opted for light-weight aluminum to get an identical really feel to at present’s commonplace tennis racket.
Now that the racket is a tangible prototype, All Design Labs and Proto Labs are making 2024 plans to indicate it off to the worldwide tennis neighborhood, each in Europe and the US.
