A client just sought my advice on a problem he has - he is producing an oval cross-section free-standing totem in board, and several hundred of these need to be strong enough, and stable enough, to enable customers to use a sliding feature on the front of them.
The problem is that the totem, which is 1700mm high by 400mm wide, is made out of 600micron boxboard. When made into an oval-section totem, this is quite stable enough and rigid enough to stand alone as a display. But if customers are going to start playing with a device on the front of it, it needs to be much more rigid and stable. Plus the sliding device itself needs to be very robust to cope with being handled thousands of times.
Due to time and budget restraints, it's not possible to get any mouldings made, for the totem or the slider. So my recommendations were:
- Beef up the totem with a B-flute corrugated inner.
- Extend the feet considerably, using an X-format to splay the feet out away from the front of the totem
- Include side pieces on the feet - this will improve the stability more, and will keep people further away from the totem, reducing tripping etc.
- For the slider, make this out of 800micron polypropylene, so it can form a tab-interlocking box, which will tab on to the front of the totem. This can be litho printed directly, or maybe have laminated stickers applied to it.
