One of the more popular old posts from this blog is my article on Design vs Modeling. My take was essentially that design can happen in your head, but modeling…
Category: manufacturing
Before I became an engineer, one of the most fascinating parts of television was those big block letters and shapes flying around the screen before the news. Wow, I want…
In product design, speed is often what it’s all about. We don’t always have the luxury of making models with perfect design intent. You can’t always make sure you’ve dotted…
Sometimes the modeling difficulty is the draft. I had forgotten about this project. It was a quickie stuck in between a couple of other larger projects about 8 years ago.…
Tolerancing is one of those practices that is applied very unevenly across the field of engineered parts. Some people are meticulous about applying tolerances, and figure stackups, reject rates, possibly…
Sustainability to me is just an offshoot of good engineering practice – efficiency. Perfect efficiency means that the output equals the input. If you run into a situation where you…
Yes, of course, design engineers should understand manufacturing processes. But the real question is how much of the process should they understand? If a little bit of knowledge is a…
Let’s play a little word association. If I say “China” to a person who is involved in manufacturing or design in the US, the reaction generally isn’t positive. It’s not…
I love cool design. I love cool manufacturing processes too. It’s fun to do cool design for cool processes. But sometimes the whole system goes wrong. You’ve got to be…