Caged unleashes SolidWorks to accelerate Caterham chassis design

In fact, the Westbury-based company reckons it has effectively transformed a decades-old hand-crafted automobile chassis manufacturing process into one that is not only faster, but more efficient and more accurate. Caged used SolidWorks to streamline the chassis design and COSMOSWorks to test load strength and tolerances. Both have become the starting points for what is now an automated design-to-manufacture process that has already let engineers design and build a universal chassis that could support four different engines in 10 days. Building a car that weighs less than 1,000 pounds and is capable of going 0-60 mph in 3.1 seconds requires that the chassis be strong and light. Caterham engineers, who had never used CAD software, were initially sceptical that any chassis designed on a computer could deliver the performance. Squance and his team moved a couple of the tubes in the chassis to improve its stiffness and alignment, and then used COSMOSWorks to prove that it was stronger. “We couldn’t have finished that first project in AutoCAD. It doesn’t have the ability to do that work,” says Phil Squance, engineering director at Caged. “SolidWorks is great because it lets you design something, tweak it, and analyze it in COSMOS to test it – all in one package.” To streamline design-to-manufacture, Caged engineers simply imported SolidWorks models directly into the software that runs the company’s laser machine that cuts the tubes for the chassis. This CNC process lets Caged produce chassis tube frames that meet engineering specifications. “SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks dramatically reduce the risk of human error from the hand-crafted process,” says Squance. “Now, when we design something, cut it, and put it together, it fits.”