InWin Development Suite, Exclusive Look at S-Frame Development & Prototypes

With the news about the InWin S-Frame now out in the wild, we can also share with you even more details of how the chassis was created. We stopped by the InWin head office to check out their product development suite, as well as their factory to see how they make their products. Of course, we had to cut a few bits from the tour in our coverage a few days ago, but now that the NDA is over, we can show you all these extra pictures of the InWin S-Frame. Once the team have a design in mind, they draft up the early concepts and put them on the board. Obviously the models on the left don’t look much like the S-Frame, but you can see how the design has grown into the more familiar model on the right. Here we see their design process diagram, a process they follow to guide them towards creating a complete product. I do love the final design, but some of these other prototypes do look pretty sweet. Once they’ve got a design they’re happy with, it is crafted out of paper and card, giving them a model to build their first prototypes from. The chassis frame is designed to be made from a single panel of aluminium. That single piece is huge, as you can see it’s over 6ft long and once the complex cuts have been made it requires a lot of skill to bend and fold the metal to the required shape. The tolerances are pretty tight when it comes to manufacturing, but the way each is made means that there are likely to be some very subtle differences in each folds angle from chassis to chassis, making each one a little unique, albeit by amounts so small you wouldn’t notice. In the office they have a few of the early prototypes for the S-Frame and other InWin chassis, as well as smaller samples of the components and materials used. Colour swatches for the aluminium finishings. Here we see a stunning black and gold model, I do prefer the black and red one we’ve seen, but this does look stunning. Plus this might be the first case that looks great with those gold covered ECS motherboards. Hey look, it’s the new D-Frame mini ad the full size D-Frame strutting their funky stuff! An early prototype for the H-Frame hiding away on top of a unit in the corner. A crazy pink finished H-Frame, same the camera doesn’t do the colours finish much justice. The thinking area, here they’ll sit and play around with other chassis (including those from rival brands), read books, look at comics and all kinds of crazy stuff to find inspiration for their next product. An InWin Tao, the stunning aluminium and glass construction which we reviewed a while back. One of the designers desks complete with drawing board, high quality monitor, and of course an awesome guitar setup for when he needs a little break to boost his creativity. Leaving the design room, we now return to the factory. Here you can see the H-Frame being measured with this laser measuring machine, testing the tolerances of the product and making sure its suitable to be a retail product. Once complete, the chassis are boxed up, loaded onto the truck and shipped out to retail. We’ll have the S-Frame in for review very soon and look forward to sharing even more details with you over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more updates and of course even more coverage from this weeks Computex event.