Everything started when I was 21 and being fascinated with the mechanics of drum pedals I wanted to try my luck and make one. It was exciting to attempt something like this were I had limited knowledge and experience but persistence and an eagerness to learn was instrumental in making it all happen.
Not having any education on the area I figured that I will have to either go to trade school or a technical college to get the education or I would have to persistently tinker way way forward, after some consideration I chose tinkering.
Due to a lucky set of circumstances including the fact that my father knew a lot about manufacturing products in small scale I had a great opportunity to get insights into how the process of making it could be done.
I started the whole journey by the first step - designing the pedal. Being all about learning, I decided to try learning CAD, a rather slow and frustrating process that took a while. Particularly frustrating was learning the 3D-mouse which I felt behaved as it wanted in the beginning, when I wanted to move things up they moved down, when I wanted them to go left they went right etc.
After having learned the basics of CAD I started designing my first drum pedal. It took me days to figure out how to make all the parts and how to make them so that they should work together. After having made a design I started to 3D-print the parts for the pedal I had designed. This was good for the purpose of seeing how the parts would look but the parts would have to be made in plastic and the durability was not sufficient for drum pedals.
So after months of learning CAD and 3D-printing and making parts for prototypes in plastic, I thought that it was time to make the real deal, that is to make them in metal.
In order to make all the parts for my prototype in metal I went to a childhood friend of my dad who had a machine shop were they made parts mostly in aluminum. There I was welcome to make the parts for my prototype in aluminum. What I realized then when we were sitting and looking at how we were supposed to make one of the parts was that this is going to take a lot longer then I had expected.
After the visit at the machine shop I felt that making a whole drum pedal might not be the right choice for a first creation. Instead I decided to start with something with less parts and were the potential for improvements were far more interesting. That's when I started on the driveshaft.
Ooper Custom Drum Pedals originates in Sweden and is currently a hobby project. It all started in 2020 with the aim of making interesting drumming equipment where designing and making and manufacturing such as parts making and assembly is all done "in house". Doing everything in a quality-oriented fashion is a fundamental aspect of Ooper despite it being only a hobby.
The design is important to allow for the high quality that Ooper should represent and the feeling of the drum gear is central for quality at Ooper. The look is also a factor contributing greatly to the quality but feel and function is of course the most important.
.png?etag=%2246ad-6464c171%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fpng&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=72%2B75&extract=0%2B0%2B72%2B74)
Association
Ooper is associated with Foos Engineering, feel free to visit the Foos Engineering website.
2024 Copyright © All rights reserved
