Equipment and Product Design Engineering, Manufacturing Process, and Troubleshooting

This is an industrial systems engineering office working in applied research, all phases of product development, with special attention to safety and code compliance. We work with consumer and business products, plus production and assembly equipment to accomplish the same. This includes technical investigations and forensic engineering expert services for private and government entities. Within those areas, our strong suit is clearly the ability to generate mathematically and graphically accurate models of operating equipment or systems to simulate or duplicate real world situations or occurrences. Mr. Berner, of this office, is a Life Member of the American Council of Engineering Companies - www.acecmn.org

Example of very successful project. We were called upon, on an emergency basis, by a small electrical component manufacturer by the name of L & L of Crystal, Minnesota. Its manufacturing vice president assigned us to identify a way around an injunction for patent infringement. We had to come up with a means to join a cord to the light for a yard light manufacturer that, in turn, would allow production of lights without infringing pre-existing patent(s). After looking a number of ways of accomplishing this, we settled on one, fabricated a working prototype, and presented it to the client. The result was clearly established as far superior to the concept being infringed. This successful follow-up by others led to company's (L & L) successful entry into the market. A few months later, the company (L & L) was purchased by Toro. The product line developed around this concept became the nucleus of Toro's Home Products Division.

Mr. Berner, of this office, as an employee, and later, as long-term Toro consultant, has either initiated, or significantly contributed to, virtually every major consumer product line of the company. In addition, he has provided design analysis for almost all of Toro's major lines of institutional equipment. His expertise in this type equipment is well documented. This office was instrumental in much of Toro's engineering development efforts throughout its high internal growth 1980-2005 period.

In the early 70's, Toro's Chairman, David Lilly, and President, Al Conover, determined Toro's need to become a full-line lawn and garden manufacturer. To accomplish this, they recognized the need to offer a serious two-stage snow thrower line. However, a number of people, including the head of Toro's R&D, said, "We are a mower company and don't belong in snow". Lilly and Conover knew better. Consequently (over strenuous objection from the head of R&D), they assigned couple relatively new engineers, independently of the formal R&D group, to research, develop a new line of two-stage snow throwers. In its second year out, the resulting 3-unit line received top ranking with Consumer Reports. Thus, Toro began its long term domination of the consumer snow industry. An unusual snow thrower concept, utilizing a curved rubber blades, was prototyped as part of this same research program, and was developed further to become Toro's "Power Curve". These same two individuals, Mittelstadt and Berner, went on to create a number of other original concepts, including Toro's "kicker" based mulching mower system, its riding mower bagging system, its extremely efficient lawn vacuum, its yard light cord connecting system, plus quite a number of original concepts to facilitate Toro's campaign to become a full-line lawn and garden manufacturer. We were a critical part of the team that accomplished this. www.toro.com

PRODUCT DESIGN Applied research, mechanical engineering, and product design efforts have involved well over 200 individual product models of various shapes, sizes and functions. We are able to provide drawings in a variety of formats including Pro-E, STL, Autocad, DXF, or most any standard format. We are able to provide "like downtown" prototypes of appliances, consumer or business equipment, or most any category appropriate for your budget.

MANUFACTURING OR PROCESS Hardware production organization and troubleshooting, equipment justification, return of investment analysis, testing and packaging. Process equipment has ranged from envelope machines, special production machinery, PC board assembly analysis, to production software, computer simulation.

TECHNICAL INVESTIGATION Our past work has involved product reviews and investigation of electrical and mechanical engineering issues concerning hardware systems for corporations, insurance carriers, law offices, and government. Efforts have ranged from small consumer product reviews, to large railway equipment, to massive earthquake simulation systems.

MEDICAL or FOOD This section was added recently. It is a compilation of past biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering projects from the above three groups that are related directly, or indirectly, to medical or food industries. This has involved a full range of engineering simulations of potential products.

WEIBULL-DR is our proprietary MS Windows based, software for integration of market research and field data with laboratory tests based upon the Weibull estimates of warranty failure cost estimates, and future reliability. Its main emphasis is based upon the Weibull distribution's incredible flexibility and usefulness. In addition to the standard statistical analyses routines of the more well known software, it uses a unique, but simple and understandable, routine for comparing field use with laboratory test data based upon the Weibull distribution...