Best Help to Design Plastics
Does the typical mechanical engineer understand the manufacturing process for the parts they design? Do they truly understand plastic injection molding? Do they realize the science and art of designing parts that can be reliably AND economically produced? Amazingly, my experience is that most engineers have very limited skills with designing for manufacturing, particularly for plastics.
So, what can we do? At Quickparts our success is dependent upon our customers (engineers, designers, product developers) having good designs that can be manufactured reliably and economically. So, we are very motivated to help our customers learn the art while developing their current products. We have many tools that help, including providing FREE Design for Manufacturing (DFM) studies for every part they design.
This free service has been very valuable for customers to get an experts perspective on their design early in the design process. It also provides them the ability to make the critical changes early so the overall product is just plain better. This is obviously an expensive service for a company to provide for free, but we feel it is our commitment to help our customers get the parts that meet their needs.
Another interesting tool that we provide free is a sample part that is designed to provide real design information to the engineer. This is a very cool part that educates the engineer on the keys to successful plastics design. We were fortunate enough to have a good independent write-up in the IDSA Materials and Process blog (http://idsamp.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/sample-licious-quickparts/) discussing this tool.
These types of free tools are expensive but can be super beneficial to the product development community. If you have designers or engineers for your products, then be sure to have them get one of these free sample parts. Just have them check out http://www.quickparts.com/RequestForms/sample_injection.aspx
