Before I even finished having Owen van den Berg as my first intern ever, I was approached by two students from the University of Oregon’s Sports Product Design program. They wanted internships as well. Honestly, I told them I was kind of overloaded and didn’t have time for them. I was looking forward to a break. They were not so easily dissuaded.
For 10 weeks I worked with them on soccer cleats. Ok, the shoes were soccer cleats, but we covered a lot of ground: sizing and proportions, basic profile based pattern making, analog pattern making, rapid prototyping, specific CAD modeling and digital pattern making techniques, chemical bonding properties, material compatibility, making components, lasting, soling and so on.
There was a lot of fussing with 3D prints – trying to get good looking sole plates and having the whole part print correctly in all dimensions. The technology is not really there yet to make usable parts that are smoothly printed in all 3 dimensions. Many sacrifices must be considered and in some cases a lot of post processing to get something to look or behave as intended.
They both graduated in June — Antonio from the undergraduate program and Max from the graduate program. They made shoes that well represented their design goals, which had previously seemed rather far out of reach.
I’m very proud of the work they did.
Projects
Antonio Licardi
Antonio made a “keel” design and in the process met one of his cleat design heroes.
Antonio was especially interested and skilled at configuring 3D print jobs. Antonio printed some toe caps and heel counters that I made based on Max’s last and shoe design. One set is ABS and the other is PLA. He also experimented with different materials and orientations.
Max Prempeh
Max had a vision for a cleat designed for Black female soccer players.
Max has been very focused on getting his cleats out into the world and was awarded the Koehn Award to continue their development. He wanted to try heat transfers, upper design without a back seam and lasted construction.
