PI-24-A · Electrosurgery · Dental device brand
They asked for a cheaper copy. They got a better machine — for less.
A customer arrived with a competitor's dental cautery unit and a two-word brief: cheaper, lighter. What left the workshop was a metal-bodied machine with more power, a new controller and a wireless footpedal — and it cost twenty percent less than the box they brought in.
Copying a competitor's unit is the most common request we get and usually the least interesting thing to build. The machine they brought in worked. It was also built around a controller doing the minimum, in an enclosure that felt like it, carrying parts that no longer earned their place.
20% cheaper
than the unit they arrived with
Every change above landed while the cost went down, not up. That is the whole engineering argument: the savings from taking parts out more than paid for putting better ones in.
- 01
Subtraction first
Before adding anything we took things out. Every part that existed because of how the original had been designed, rather than because the machine needed it, came out. That is where the money came from — not cheaper components, fewer of them.
- 02
A metal body
The enclosure was rebuilt in metal. It is the part a dentist handles every day, and the part that decides whether a machine reads as equipment or as a toy.
- 03
A controller worth the name
The original control board did the minimum. Its replacement gave us headroom for the interface, the power range and everything that followed.
- 04
Feather-touch front panel
Buttons that answer to a touch rather than a press. In a surgery, with gloves on, that is not a styling decision.
- 05
More output, not less
The power range went up — the opposite of what a cost-reduction exercise normally produces.
- 06
A wireless footpedal
The pedal lost its cable. It is the change that most alters how the machine is used, because the cord on a footpedal is the thing always in the way.
The brief was to copy something cheaply. What we argued instead was that the same money, spent differently, buys a better machine. Their name is the one on the front of it.
What is not here
No photographs, on purpose.
The machine carries the customer’s name and the design is theirs. We describe what we changed and why; we do not publish their product as though it were our portfolio piece. Your project would be written up the same way, or not at all.
Arrived with a competitor's unit?
That is the most common way a project starts here. Tell us what it has to do and what it must not cost, and we will tell you what is possible.