We love getting the opportunity with new clients on product design and development, especially in industries that we haven’t worked with before. We learn a ton from our clients, and hopefully, they learn something from working with us as well. Yellow Jacket provided us with that exact opportunity this year when they let us work on the AccuProbe IR Leak Detector. They created a great product with an innovative design that will help folks spot refrigerant leaks, even in hard-to-reach spaces.

Yellow Jacket: Focused, Solution Driven Product Design

Yellow Jacket is the standard for hoses, tools, refrigeration gauges, manifolds, and HVAC vacuum pumps. For over sixty years, they’ve engineered products that just plain work the right way. That commitment to excellence really shows in their products, which continue to innovate through a product design perspective. These aren’t folks that just rest on their laurels, they provide new and interesting products for their client base and are always looking to create something great.

When we met Yellow Jacket at a trade show, they were already in a great place as far as product design and development. They have several existing products on the market, they have a great track record in the industry, but they (and we can’t emphasize this enough) weren’t satisfied to just stay with the products they had, they wanted to create something new and different. They came to us because they needed a durable flex arm that wasn’t a noodle for a new product.

How Moffatt Products Supplied the Accuprobe IR Leak Detector with a flex arm

One of Yellow Jacket’s newest products is the Accuprobe IR Leak detector, which can be used to detect all CFC, HCFC, HFC, and HFA refrigerants. It’s a compact little piece of equipment that needed to be able to be easily adjusted, but also strong enough to stay in that position. The Accuprobe is designed for extremely small spaces, and with a tiny payload of a simple sensor on the end, it seemed ideal for a flex arm.

The reason to be able to work inside a small hole was huge for this product. That’s because you don’t want to make a bigger hole in the ductwork than you need to. The arm on the product also needed to be able to be adjusted to get around corners and in other hard-to-reach places so that the operator could have extra flexibility when measuring for refrigerants. Here’s what Bryon Stee, had to say about our flex arm development.

This application makes use of the smallest diameter (6mm) Flex Arm material that we produce.  That small diameter was necessary to allow an HVAC operator to drill a small 3/8″ diameter hole in ductwork and to properly position the tiny Flex Arm so they are able to check for HVAC leaks.

In the end, we were able to provide Yellow Jacket with a solution that worked for them. While the results speak for themselves, we’re proud to get to work with a company that focuses on innovation and quality. Those are two areas that we place a lot of importance on as well. If you’re curious to learn more about our process or have an idea that you’d like to run by us, we’d love to be able to chat with you. 

Moffatt Products continuously looks for new opportunities to work in diverse industries. Not just limited to flex arms, we want to be an accountable vendor that can get the job done on whatever your project needs. We’ll explore that idea a little more in-depth in next week’s blog. Until then, head on over to Yellow Jacket’s page and see what else they have in store. It was a pleasure to work with them. 

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Working on a flex arm design? We are here for a no-pressure phone call. We’d love to hear more about what you are working on and give you ideas and prototypes to improve your decision-making process. Give us a call, we promise it will be worth your while.