Beuchat opens the doors of its factory to us in Marseille, to explain to us in pictures how a new regulator is born: from the design office until it reaches your diving bag, the road is long!
FROM THE SPECIFICATIONS TO THE PROTOTYPE
The design of a regulator cannot be improvised and owes nothing to chance. Everything starts with very precise marketing specifications, which lists the expectations and needs of divers: consumer studies, feedback from resellers and salespeople around the world or, in the case of Beuchat, through their dive center, all the information collected guides the choices. And from this first document, we then establish a technical specification: the goal, to provide technological responses to the benefits expected by divers. The development phase begins, during which engineers rely on 3D scanning tools to draw the various parts of the regulator. The prototype born from these drawings will initially be tested in the hyperbaric development bench, modified, tested again to give full satisfaction. Several prototypes will therefore be produced which will allow the regulator to be tested in a natural environment under different conditions of use.
The feedback from this test phase is then integrated into the technical specifications of the final regulator: we can start production!
FROM MANUFACTURING TO TEST BENCH
Particularity of the Marseilles brand, everything is done on site. Beuchat has a
machine park for the injection of various plastic components, but also numerically controlled machining machines for the production of the metal parts of the regulator. The metrology department then carries out a dimension control and a profile control of the various components manufactured. Each piece is checked, and those that are satisfactory then join the assembly workshops, where operators manually assemble the regulators.
Finally each product regulator is set and checked on a hyperbaric test bench, an operation which is finalized by the edition of the specific breathing curve of this regulator. Curve that once printed will be attached to the regulator you buy from your dealer.
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