Fastener Selection for Machines That Vibrate Fastener Selection for Machines That Vibrate Machine fasteners have one job, and it is not to hold parts together. It is to hold them together under vibration, thermal cycling,…
Linear Guides and Ball Screws: Sizing Them Like a Machine Builder Linear Guides and Ball Screws: Sizing Them Like a Machine Builder Linear motion components are sold like commodities, and they are sized like commodities,…
Sheet Metal Enclosures That Survive the Factory Floor Sheet Metal Enclosures That Survive the Factory Floor Sheet metal fabrication looks easy on paper, and that is exactly why so many enclosures come back from the…
Pneumatic Cylinder Sizing That Survives Real Shop Air Pneumatic Cylinder Sizing That Survives Real Shop Air Every design office has a favorite pneumatic cylinder catalog and a default bore size. The default is usually too…
Welded Frames That Stay Straight: Design Rules for Fabricated Machine Structures Welded Frames That Stay Straight: Design Rules for Fabricated Machine Structures Every shop has a story about a welded frame that looked perfect on…
Gear Tooth Wear on the Shop Floor: What the Contact Pattern Tells You Gear Tooth Wear on the Shop Floor: What the Contact Pattern Tells You Gear design gets treated like a black art, and…
Every automated machine is a collection of mechanisms doing a job: the four-bar that indexes the tray, the cam that lifts the punch, the crank-slider that drives the press, the geneva that turns the turret….
3D printing has a special place in mechanical design. It is the only manufacturing process where the designer can hold a part in their hands hours after sketching it. That speed is intoxicating, and it…
Ask a CAD user to describe their most tedious task and they will not hesitate. It is the same task they did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that: the flange that…
Standards get a bad reputation. To the young designer, they look like bureaucratic walls between the idea and the part. To the experienced engineer, they are the reason anything ever fits, assembles, or gets machined…
The design process has a rhythm problem. Early in a project, changes are cheap and fast, but nobody knows what to change. Late in a project, everybody knows exactly what is wrong, and changing it…
Non-standard automation equipment is the part of mechanical engineering where the textbook runs out. Nobody publishes a catalog for the machine that has to press, inspect, and stack three different part variants at forty cycles…
A parametric model is a promise. It promises that when you change a dimension, the part updates sensibly. It promises that when the next engineer opens the file, they can find the driving parameters and…
Finite element analysis has a dangerous reputation problem. On one side, engineers treat it as a magic black box that blesses any design with colorful stress plots. On the other side, veteran designers dismiss it…
Every engineering team knows the pain. A drawing that was perfectly fine last week has somehow been overwritten. Someone renamed the “final” folder to “final_v2”, and now there are three files that all look like…
