CONNECTION

Dressel Designs Presents: Connection 

Back in March of 2022 following the success of the Emotion, Max over at @editionyoyo and @avery.gingie were begging for a bimetal version and I got to work.

I quickly realized through many attempts at a bimetal CAD that it would be near impossible to create without an odd aesthetic with the weight rings, major changes to specs, or a ridiculously heavy weight.  The main concern here was losing that stepped lower rim in the cup of the design, which was a huge part of the Emotion's overall aesthetic.

Eventually, I thought about creating the stepped rim aesthetic by using a different material.  Thus Connection proto 1 was born.  We created a sandwich between the Aluminum and Steel with a large plastic piece which simulated the stepped rim aesthetic in the cup of the Emotion, but allowed us to pack a lot of extra weight to the SS rim.  The result was an aesthetically striking and classy design with a very unique complexity to it.  This design had the same specs as the original Emotion, but was about 1 gram lighter.

This design did have some issues, specifically in playfeel and performance that ultimately outweighed how much we loved the aesthetic.  Removing all of that inner rim/mid weight from replacing the aluminum with polycarbonate and placing it in the SS ring caused a huge amount of sluggishness or lag to the design during play.  It moved well enough but felt like it needed a ton of input for it to move, so back to the drawing board I went.

How were we able to get more weight balanced across the rim to potentially fix this issue?  With a lighter overall weight and an increase in diameter, but the real magic was from replacing the previously outer ring design with a more midship SS ring, this allowed us to spread the weight out more evenly across the rim, which effectively removes the sluggishness we felt in our first prototype.
This new prototype would eventually become the production model with the following specs:

55.8mm Diameter
46mm Width
64.8g Weight
4.5mm Gap
7075 AL + PC + SS

Lastly shout-out to @aapenn1 for our airplay engraving and Patreon member Brian Corliss for the clever name idea!