Engineer Like a Boss – CNC Design Guideline

What Manufacturing Process will be Used First?

Ask yourself this simple question before you start. Design for the first manufacturing process while employing skeletal modeling methods to enable you to add/subtract features for the next step of the manufacturing process. Your design is going to change a thousand times, make it easy on yourself to do that. Like I’ve said before, consider where you are in the development cycle and follow The 3 Axioms of DFM (Design for Manufacturability). Don’t put yourself into a high-cost design situation early.

It’s best to adopt a mindset to design multiple versions/configurations for each step of the product development cycle.

The Dark Art of FEA can make Cheap & Easy parts

Finite Element Analysis is a dark art, easy to become lost in its wizardry and we have to take the numbers it generates with a grain of salt.  FEA analysis is a great tool to understand the behavior of our designs under various loading scenarios to help us design cheap and easy parts.  It will shine a spotlight on weak areas and reveal elusive obvious insights into a more efficient design.