About Us

F.S. New Products Inc. was founded in 1979 in Palos Verdes, California by Fred T. Smith. Fred T. was a prolific inventor, with over 200 U.S. and foreign patents in the fields of excavating equipment, trucking equipment, refuse equipment, hydraulically operated mobile equipment and exercise equipment.

Prior to founding F.S. New Products, Fred T. was the director of Research and Development at Garwood, a division of Sargent Industries. In 1978 Garwood was acquired by The Heil Company, a leading manufacturer in the refuse equipment market. F.S. New products started as a small company with only one engineer. The first projects were an automated side lift for the Heil Company and a refuse handling system in Buenos Aires, South America for Waste Management.

In 1980, Fred P. Smith (Fred T.’s son), came to work with F.S. New Products while he finished his Bachelor’s degree at Cal State Long Beach. Over the next decade, the company continued to grow in California, adding employees and clients in various industries, although the Heil Company and Waste Management remained their two biggest clients.

In 1989, the company moved to Alpine, UT where their headquarters are located today. As FS New Products continued to grow, the areas of their consulting services expanded to other areas. They started applying their engineering knowledge and expertise to trailers, cranes, and exercise equipment, among others.

Over the years, we have worked on the design of just about every type of trailer you can imagine. We have designed dump trailers, end dumps, side dumps, belly dumps and moving floor trailers. We have designed flat beds and expandable side trailers. We have worked on enclosed cargo trailers and DOT oil and natural gas tankers. We have designed roll off trailers, pneumatic trailers, and custom special use trailers. We have designed trailers with gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) ranging from 2,000 to over 120,000 lbs (which amazingly still meets bridge laws in some states!)

In the 90’s, AED employees started using finite element analysis. In those early days, the programs were run on a DOS computer with an 80MB hard drive (Yes, MB, not GB).

In order to get it to work, we had to remove every program and bit of information, aside from the actual FEA software, from the computer.

The part was drawn in the FEA software usually with shells, and was meshed by hand. It took a lot to analyze even a simple part with a couple hundred nodes. Once ready, parts were often left to run overnight because the process was so time consuming.

As the years went by, 3D modeling and FEA software has improved dramatically. In providing the best engineering services for our clients, we try to stay on the forefront of technology, blending the newest techniques with old-school understanding and analysis methodologies.

In 2000, after Fred T. retired, Fred P. started his own company Alpine Engineering and Design, Inc. (AED).One of AED’s first customers was a small startup making insulated aerial lifts, which was run out of the founder’s garage when we started working with them. Over the next 15 years, we worked closely with their engineering and marketing teams to design and certify multiple aerial lifts ranging from 28 to 55 ft. As new products were added to their product line, they grew until they were acquired by a leading global equipment manufacturer.

During this time, AED engineers also worked with lift gate manufacturers to solve different problems encountered in the industry, and designed analyzed and tested multiple models over a number of years.

AED has remained a small, boutique engineering firm in order to best provide individualized and personalized service to our clients. Our two offices in the intermountain west service companies across the United States, and we regularly travel to meet with clients and inspect equipment. Give us a call to see how you can benefit from our engineering experience.

Around the year 2000, AED made a conscious decision to pursue more forensic engineering work. Forensic engineering, is applying engineering knowledge to legal applications. We are usually involved in one of two ways, evaluating the safety and/or failure of products, and providing opinions on intellectual property matters, mostly patent infringement cases or IPR’s. Over the last 20 years, we have consulted on over 500 cases.

In recent years, we have expended our team and our services to the design and analysis of ziplines and thrill rides. Working with different manufacturers and theme park owners we have analyzed over 150 unique installations of ziplines and other one-of-a-kind attractions.

Our engineers are licensed professional engineers (PE’s) and are able to certify designs for products we have analyzed. We have found that this is qualification and ability is scarcer than you might imagine, especially in the mechanical discipline. This is one reason why a majority of our consulting work is on products and equipment that need to not break. That being said, we have also designed and analyzed multiple consumer products ranging from kitchen cleaning tools to blenders and collapsible furniture.