Latest articles

Here's a useful table of tolerance and surface roughness achievable with cutting and machining process (collectively termed "material removal processes"

This information has been collated personally by myself from a variety of sources. If you have any suggestions of processes to include in this table please leave a comment and they will be added.
...

I was asked to make tutorial of design of DAFT PUNK helmet. Now i finished it and here it is, so you can make this helmet too. This tutorial do not cover electronics and assembly details, just how to model plastic parts of helmet. Model is free for download from this page. This tutorial do not cover electronics and assembly details, just how to model plastic parts of helmet. (Designed in Siemens NX6)

...

Siemens NX, PMI (Product and manufacturing information) basic use tutorial

I need CRITICS so I can make next one better, give me all You have!
...

I first encountered “Rapid Prototyping” or “3D Printing” back in the late 1980's, when I contracted with a Canadian company that offered the service based on a process that used a laser to cure specific regions of a soup of liquid plastic. Very impressive, and so was the price-several thousand dollars to produce a prototype that, in production, should have cost less than a dollar. Most of the costs were the result of converting the 2D mechanical drawings (about the only option back in those days, unless you happened to work for a major aerospace or automotive company) to machine code for controlling the laser.
...

This is one easy tutorial for tools that have very advanced usage. It is Mesh N-sided surface and Through Curves command. in this tutorial I will make one really simple part with this two tools, but they almost have no limits for creative usage.

We will start this tutorial with new document, and first we will make new sketch in it.


...

Injection molding is one of the most common manufacturing methods to produce thin-wall engineered parts. Development of molds that produce high quality parts is a talent that develops with experience. Due to the time and effort required to develop a good set of tooling, it is not unusual for manufacturers to seek out injection molding machines that will be compatible with their molds, rather than trying to redesign molds to work on specific machines.

Design checklist
As designers of injection molded products you are probably well aware of design best practice. What you may not appreciate is the important contribution a well designed mould tool can make to the new product development process. The wrong decisions taken at the critical early stage of a project will add cost and time to mould tool design, manufacture and maintenance, put pressure on product launch dates, and, of course, adversely affect product manufacture and in-use performance.
...

There are limits to the dimensions and tolerances that can be machined along the plane of the metal sheet, since etchants used in the photochemical machining process concurrently etch metals laterally and vertically through the thickness (T) of the sheet.

Because the metal at the surface of a sheet is exposed to etchant longer than the metal at the center of the sheet, the surface of a part etches laterally more than metal at the center. The following planar dimensions are related directly to the thickness of that sheet.

Hole Size/ Slot Width
The smallest hole diameter (D) or slot width that can be produced by the Fotofab process, as a general rule, is 1.2 times the metal thickness. The minimum practical diameter or slot width that can be machined is .005 inch ( 0.13 mm).

Bar Widths
Spacing of metal between the holes and/or slots in a design is not an issue using photochemical machining. However, when a part contains holes and/or slots that are spaced closely together, such as with a fine resolution screen or encoder disc, the width of the metal that remains between them is referred to as the bar width (W).
...