Ergonomic Paint-roller | SolidWorks + Industrial Engineering

An independent inventor local to my area was looking for help with putting together his dream project - an ergonomic paint-roller design. He had noticed that while using off the shelf paint-rollers, his arms and shoulders would quickly get tired, and he'd end up with wrist pain by the end of the day. This was an idea that he'd been tinkering with for a few years, and he already had a few functioning prototypes created from wood pieces. The goal was to create a design that would more evenly distribute the weight/stress of the paint-roller across the forearm to eliminate wrist pain, as well as making it easier on arm and shoulder muscles to use.

What made this project more challenging from a design perspective was the fact that the client did not want to include any adjustable components - this would need to comfortably fit the widest possible range of body sizes, while being a single "jack of all trades" foam plastic molded part with a single mold. It would also need to include a paint pole thread so that it could attach to other off the shelf paint pole parts.

In order to make the design work for 95% of body sizes, anthropometry data was used for forearm, wrist, and hand dimensions. This was incorporated into the design in order to provide a fit that would function for all body sizes between the 5th percentile female and the 95th percentile male users.

In addition, this project also involved working with:

Mechanical product design

SolidWorks 3D Modeling

Injection, compression, gas-assist, and foam molding DFM

Designing for 3D printing (and producing prototype parts)

3D rendering with PhotoView360