Metals Fabrication Firm Uses Engineering Ingenuity to Bring Home a Silver Medal

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Now that the 2016 summer games are in the books, it’s time to gear up for the 2018 winter games with a medal-winning user story from NuQuest, a design and manufacturing firm. With SOLIDWORKS as the standard development platform, NuQuest was able to create the medal-winning skeleton race sled for Team USA.

NuQuest,a Utah-based design automation, systems development, and metals fabrication firm, leverages its extensive expertise to develop innovative systems and equipment that serve a variety of applications in diverse industries – and we do mean diverse with projects ranging from drill bits to skeleton sleds.

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Coincidentally, NuQuest’s Project Manager Janson Pace happens to be married to world-renowned skeleton sled racer Noelle Pikus-Pace. Janson Pace was determined to use SOLIDWORKS software to develop a better, faster sled and in the process help his wife achieve her Olympic dream. “We needed to make some changes to the flexibility of the sled,” Pace recalls. “I also used an XBOX 360™ Kinect™ to scan her body, brought the scan data into SOLIDWORKS software, and created a sled saddle contour that fit her perfectly. All that work culminated in her silver-medal-winning run.”nuquest_image_2.jpg

NuQuest prides itself on being a master of all trades and critical to its success has been producing a more agile, flexible approach to designing and engineering innovative systems. The Nucleus, for example, provides customers with an automated, hands-free, vertical grinding system for manufacturing diamond-studded drill bits, which has enabled NuQuest to expand its drill-bit manufacturing product line and extend grinding wheel life tenfold. “The ability to quickly and easily make design modifications in SOLIDWORKS software is an important advantage,” adds Pace. “Designing in SOLIDWORKS enables you to make all of your mistakes in the software, which saves time and money.”

NuQuest has also taken advantage of SOLIDWORKS Subscription Services, which provides delivery of new releases of the software, technical support, online training resources, and access to the growing SOLIDWORKS Community through My.Solidworks.com. “There’s value for us in staying current with the latest version of the software, getting technical support, and accessing training materials,” Pace says.

Read the full case study and learn more about how NuQuest focused on the fundamentals of efficiency, leveraged its versatility, and used engineering know-how to bring home an Olympic medal.

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Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.
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