Alan Dollo, a French kayaker in the top na-tional division, who completed a 2-year course in designing industrial products, followed by a professional-oriented degree in plastics and composite materials, has set himself a new challenge: successfully design and produce blades and paddles for kayak polo lovers and ranked sports people. To that end, the kayak cham-pion created his own firm, Finest Composite, set up near to the nautical center of Pau, within reach of the top ranked kayakers in the country, and a stone's throw from the Helioparc technopole (start-up services for new firms in the Pau area) and Cetim Sud- Ouest. This proved to be the right decision as, after manually designing and producing his first ever competition blade known as "Wave", the young entrepreneur asked Cetim Sud-Ouest to digitalize his blade to improve quality and automatically reproduce the product on a digitally-controlled machine.
From manual craft to industrialization
Thanks to reverse engineering, after a 3D digitalization of the blade, a file was produced in a standard CAD format. "I was looking for a company able to reverse engineer my "Wave" blade model which I initially produced manually" explained Alan Dollo "While I was trying to find such a firm, I contacted the advisors at the Helioparc technopole in Pau, who suggested I should contact Cetim Sud- Ouest. Their teams were imme-diately prepared to listen to my needs and showed real competences. Thanks to the re-verse engineering approach, we converted a scatterplot ob-tained by scanning the blade into a file in STEP format (Standard for exchange of product model data), which can be used on any powered tool." Thanks to this operation, Alan was also able to remove minor roughness defects, which were not visible to the naked eye, and optimize the epoxy resin and carbon thicknesses, with Cetim Sud-Ouest experts, in order to obtain a more effective product with consistent quality levels. Our athlete has acquired a digitally-controlled milling machine and is now ready to launch small production runs.
