Company Joins University to Develop Torch for the 2002 Winter Olympics

The torch was designed to resemble an icicle, with its body tapered using antique silver finish and dark-shaded grooves running from top to bottom. The outer shell was made from aluminum plating that produced a high-polished chrome finish. For the first time, the Olympic torch was topped with a glass crown where the flame emerges from a small copper cauldron inside the handle. It took an interdisciplinary team eight months to build, test and manufacture the three-pound, 31-inch tall torch.

When the Olympic Committee first approached Georgia Tech with sketches of what they wanted and asked them to help develop it, the short deadline that the committee gave the university was never an issue since Tech engineers had been through it all before - at the Atlanta Games just five years previous.

"Since we had experience creating the 1996 torches, we knew what we had to do in terms of the types of materials we needed, design time issues we would encounter and final product manufacturing processes," says Tim Purdy, instructor of industrial design at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA) and part of the engineering design team for the winter torch. "We wound up calling on people we had used before. It turned out to be a pretty dynamic project considering the short amount of time we had to accomplish it."

Flaming Issues

Using its Alias Studio 3-D CAD program, Georgia Tech engineers initially modeled the lower and upper casting pieces of the torch as well as the logo the Winter Olympic Committee wanted molded on its side. After designing a cauldron-like apparatus wrapped in copper wiring to help conduct the heat away from the glass to prevent warping, Georgia Tech contacted Coleman (Wichita, KS) - the camping equipment company - to prototype a working burner, which they did. Because of the work that went into it, the lighted torch is able to withstand the elements - including 45-mile-per-hour winds - and can carry enough fuel for a 20-minute burn time at any one time.

"From what we can see, the flame burns great," says Purdy. "The burner assembly we initially wanted to use did not leave enough space inside the torch, so we had to go in and scale everything up a little. It's half an inch wider at the top and utilizes metallic parts instead of the plastic injected parts we initially were looking at."

Mechanical Design Challenges

The Georgia Tech design team considered manufacturing the torch body in plastic, so Quickparts.com engineers looked into the plastic idea, quoting injection molding tools as well as materials for getting the right coloring for the torch. When the Olympic Committee was presented with a plastic torch proposal, committee members immediately turned it down; indicating that there was no way an Olympic torch was going to be made from plastic. The IOC dictated that the torch bodies would be manufactured using a metal casting process instead.

With the short amount of time allowed by the committee, Quickparts.com provided instantaneous quotes and made working models of the torch so photos could be taken for the Winter Olympics 2002 website. The prototypes were manufactured using an SLA 5000 machine by 3D Systems, Inc. (Valencia, CA) and the SL 7540, a durable material from Vantico, Inc. (East Lansing, MI), but only after doing some clean up on the torch parts files themselves.

Originally, Georgia Tech sent over its STL data to Quickparts.com and got quotes instantly. However, upon receiving the order, the company had to perform some "repair work" on the torch STL files. After cleaning up the files and inputting them into the SLA software, the data was sliced and sent across the network to the SLA machine, which took between 16 and 20 hours to complete the project. After being SLA'd, the prototypes were removed from the machine, cleaned and finished, then sent to Georgia Tech for the final assembly in preparation for the photo shoots.

"Because the time pressures were non-negotiable, we enabled Georgia Tech to accelerate the schedule by using our website to upload the torch CAD data and get quotes instantly," says Mark Mackie, vice president of sales for Quickparts.com. "We committed ourselves to shipping the prototype torch in just four days. With the visibility of this project so high and the number of people we committed to the project, we were happy to shave days out of the process using our instant online system."

After delivering several sets of prototype torches, Quickparts.com quoted the manufacturing of the 17,000 torches that would be used along the route to the winter games. In addition to the torch's aluminum investment cast body, a manufacturer in Detroit was enlisted to put a shiny chrome finish on all of the torches. A glass factory in Croatia created the tempered glass used to give the torches their icicle-like appearances. The factory cut the glass, grinded it and continuously re-fired the torch's glass facade to give it more of an angled look.

"The results of everyone's work can be seen on news stations covering the 2002 Winter Olympics," says Purdy. "We're just proud that we were chosen to be a part of it."