After doing a bunch of price research on my Topper, I'm embarking on a near full-scale teardown. The reason is, as I noted earlier this week, that I'm not really taking advantage of the technology as much as I could be. My design requires a lot of support structures, and could also be a bit less massive.

As a result, I'm pursuing a different approach. Early this week I spoke to Sia Mahdavi at Within Labs, and I'm hoping that his company will be able to guide me through this next step - converting what is essentially a hollow tube-like structure into a lattice form.

My first step was to strip my model back down to a primitive shape, which I did this evening.

By removing a lot of the features I had in the model, I can give Sia and his engineers a clean starting point from which to reimagine the design. Ultimately I may end up reconfiguring the part more significantly (the saddle clamp mechanism is, in some ways, sub optimal) but for now I'm just excited to see what they come up with. Expect updates next week.