Easily see what effects, intended and unintended, that change has on the part.īecause there is little to no formal training for proper modelling technique, companies must rely on the experience and mentorship of its senior level staff to pass on their knowledge. When good design techniques are followed, feature references are clear and an engineer changing the part can:Ģ. This takes a little longer and costs a little more initially but is critically important for the product lifecycle. Unfortunately, there are no courses in our educational curriculum devoted to carefully creating part models such that another skilled engineer, not necessarily intimate with the initial design, can understand what is happening.
How and when these features are defined and how they are referenced is the key to a well-organized, understandable and editable part model. Our “lines of code” are features that define how the product looks and functions: holes, bosses, ribs, rounds, extrudes, and cuts. Modeling parts and assemblies in CAD is very much like coding software, except that in many ways, we are much more limited in how we can display and document our intent. The level of automation built into our amazing design tools makes it possible, even easy, to create a beautiful, functional, and manufacturable part that meets every design and performance objective, but can still be an unintelligible, un-editable mess. Much like in software, quality mechanical design is every bit about the result and the process. What is frequently overlooked is that good mechanical design is much more than simply reaching the finish line. The designs that are not easy to produce are quickly weeded out and rarely see the light of day. It is up to the talents and experience of the design engineer to ensure that those parts are producible. CAD tools automate many of the underlying tasks and let us focus on creating parts and assemblies that meet the functional demands outlined in the product requirements and the aesthetics of the industrial design.
When we mechanical engineers create our designs, we rely heavily on our Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools, amazing and enormously complex masterpieces of modern software engineering and design. Architecture Exploration and Requirementsĭesigning a quality product is hard work, but if you are a SolidWorks or other CAD user, check out the top 10 secrets that nobody taught us in school.
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