Offroad Animal's engineering team is actually something unique here in Australia.  Every single one of them is a qualified mechanical engineer.  I'm not saying that other companies don't use qualified engineers, but a lot of them often just use people who know CAD for have just worked in the industry before.  This is fine but if you actually want something properely designed there is nothing quite like using a fully qualified person to do it.  Kinda of like getting your mate whos once built a deck in his backyard not build you a house.  Do it right and get the right people on the job I say.

Okay enough about that, What is the engineering process here at Offroad Animal.  Well for starters we are all based in Melbourne Australia, Mornington Victoria to be exact.  Here is our process

1. Scan a vehicle with a 3D scanner                                                                                                        

2. Load scan into our computers and begin designing with Solidworks CAD package

3. Build prototypes, most of the time here in Melbourne at our local manufacturing plant in Croyden Victoria. 

4.Measure prototypes for compliance

5. Test fit product to a vehicle

6. Test drive vehicle and confirm all sensors and tech work as intended. 

7. Confirm notes with any changes if any required for full scale manufacturing

8. Draft Fitting instructions, which is usually an industry benchmark as documenent that on average is 80 pages long.  We sure make it easy for you to fit our products with confidence.  Sometimes we even include a YouTube Video showing how to do it as well. 

9. Photograph the product on the vehicle and load information on to the website

10. Crash test or phyical test of the product.  For example for a bull bar, we crash test the bar in our own dedicated Quasi-static test machine where we crush the bar with a 20T ram.  We measure results and make changes as required

11. Load test in our test rig the recovey points so we can rate them

12. Load test the winch cradle so we can offer a winch rating for the bull bar

13. Next we actually crash test the factoy crash beam and bumper system to compare to ours for compliance

It's these steps that set us above a lot of the rest.  I mean there seems to be countless bull bars available here that are just a Chinese company offering a catelog bumper (and even sometimes a countiefiet Offroad Animal one) to some importer in Australia who flogs them online super cheap.  Even some of the larger bull bar companies might not design the bars in house fully and utilise contract designers overseas.  There are some really good companies locally especially here in Victoria that do similar to us and desing compeltelty inhouse.  Nice touch and full respect to them. They have their own style too which is great even though our styling looks better in my opinion.  

Speaking on styling, Offroad Animal strives to make a bull bar that 1. Looks amazing by being modern, clean and aggressive, but 2. Actually performs how you want.  We need the bull bars to work off road. That's because we actually drive off road and love heading bush and camping.  

It's things like having hi-lift jacking spots in each bar, or having the ability to access the winch through the front of the bar and not have to remove the whole bar for maintenance or winch installation.  Also we have a nice access hole to reach the winch clutch lever.  Imagine making a winch bull bar where you can't access with free spool. Silly right, but some companies do exactly that.  Now what else, yes approach angle.  We always try to get the absolute best we can here as we don't want to hit rocks, trees or steps with our front end either, so we don't expect you to. 

Here are all the standards and regulations we design to for bull bars: AS4876.1-2002, ADR 8/1, 42/04, 43/04, 69/00, 73/33 and soon to be ADR 98

We also test our roof racks much more than others do.  We don't just go for a test drive, we do full Australian Standards testing to AS1235-2000.  This involves not just putting heavy weights on it but pulling it forward to mimic heavy braking as well as pulling up to similate the surf board effect, which is one of the most notorious was roof racks fail.  Basically having something long like a surfboard catching the wind and ripping the rack off your roof.

There is so much that goes in to a bull bar design but rest assured you have qualified engineers looking after you on this with Offroad Animal

As for manufacturing, well we make hundreds of bars a month right here in Australia, but our local factory can't keep up with our demand so we also manufactuer more bars in Vietnam and now Thailand too.  

Here is a video we show with 4wd 24/7 showing our Prado, but also our testing rig. 

Okay last up engineering introductions

1. David Fitzpatrick: Bachelor Mechanical engineering 2003 Monash Univerity:While I don't do too many designs anymore, I did start the company and came up with the first Predator and Toro bars, and still do the odd design here and there
2. Chris Williams: Bachelor Mechanical Engineering 2013 Monash University: Chris is actually based in Mansfield and heads out bush a lot.  He's our first full time employee after David and regularly designs lots of Offroad Animal products
3. Leon Shi: Double degree, Bachelor Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering, 2017 Monash University. Leon is a wiz with bull bars and anything creative. 

Here is another video showing how we did this for the 250 series Toyota Prado