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As a team comprised of automotive designers, we treasure car culture in its totality. The automotive community validates the need for exciting vehicles today, thus giving reason to our existence. In order to maintain that respect, each and every keypiece requires us to dive deep into the roots of a specific model, its heritage, and where it stands today.
Honoring cars and their owners is what allows each one of our creations to add value to a culture rather than to simply ‘take’ from it.
Cars and humans go hand in hand. For instance, cars are often humanized and perceived with facial expressions. Perhaps what keeps cars alive & a part of us is simply due to the fact that the design process for them has remained, well, also human. We’ve retained the very important step of hand sketching every idea we have for our keypieces.
Designers at Porsche spend up to 6 months adjusting the shape of a 911 fender. This is where we continue to take cues from our experience designing for major automotive brands by moving into digital sketching. It’s no different from hand-drawing other than using a stylus on a screen.
We toil over every detail, surface change, and shape by shading in every single form in a multitude of variations. Digital design allows us to exhaust all possibilities in order to ensure we’ve reached the right answer.
The modern day FJ Cruiser takes the trophy for being the first mass produced vehicle with an interior designed entirely through CAD [Computer Aided Design]. No wonder the cockpit is so blocky and stiff!
Our keypieces, along with many production vehicles, transition smoothly from digital design into CAD. Translating drawings into mathematical 3D plots can be quite challenging, especially since this is where all the finely measured functional elements are baked into the product.
Automotive design tends to approach beauty both scientifically and through good ole’ fashion trial and error. Often times, a design can look perfect both on paper & on the computer screen, then subsequently look terrible in physical form.
We run through multiple generations of the final design as 3D printed prototypes in order to strike the right balance figuratively and literally. This is yet another effort to exhaust all design possibilities prior to moving onto Swiss machining.
There’s an art to machining beautiful objects. This is where we take a cue from the Swiss watch industry and fine tune every tool choice along with its path in order to achieve a truly functional piece of jewelry.
Using our in-house CNC machine, we aim to achieve tighter tolerance than OEM keys themselves while designing a beautifully textured surface finish. Finally, several test fitments along with cycle tests guide calibration for all functional elements down to 0.001 millimeter.
Designers tend to sweat the small stuff, & here at Formawerx we’ll be the first to admit when something isn’t up to par.
Though our creations are humble next to a certain company trying to get to mars, the level of attention, finish, and quality necessary to pass our standards for form & function matches to said company. That’s why we build our keypieces in the same facility right here in Southern California making the pieces and parts that go into outer space.
Cars, sneakers, watches, knives, coffee, whiskey; what do these have in common? Choice, individuality, and self-expression. Products of passion tend to highlight all facets of humanity and we see no difference with our keypieces.
Whether it’s a simple pet name, or a full factory paint match program, we offer bespoke individualization services for every reference. Even if you don’t see something on our site, feel free to inquire. We are, after all, automotive designers at your disposal.
