Rowing Machine Drive Webbing Shipping Protection Device

                                
                   
    This design process was motivated by a field problem wherein customers found the handle of their rowing machine to be flipped upside down at the end of the unboxing experience. The issue could present itself by a variety of symptoms, but the root cause lied in twisting of the rowers’ drive webbing, introduced during either boxing at the factory or unboxing by the user. 

As a preventative measure, I designed a simple part for injection molding, to be installed on to the webbing during packaging at the factory. The below video shows installation of the device on to the webbing, and subsequent routing of the handle to its storage location for packaging.


The device ensures a consistant orientation of the webbing as it exits the rowing machine. A user can flip the handle ‘downstream’ of the device, but the device will remain in its original orientation. If a user is to pull the handle out of the rower and then introduce a twist, the device will prevent this twist from travelling in to the rowing machine. 

The device is removed from a machine simply by removing a pin, as shown below.



After this prototyping stage, I added an informative sticker directing users to pull the pin for removal of this small device, and also changed the color to stand apart from other parts of of the rowing machine. The design passed DFM review for injection molding at our CM, and advanced to tooling. It has not yet been implemented to production.