The surface finish of your product components is just as important as any as any of the other design considerations.  Often, my clients aren’t aware of all of the options available to them, nor the resulting properties and benefits.  Surfacing is an industry all on its own, and there are far too many options to […]

The field of Material Science and Heat Treating is far too vast to give a comprehensive treatment on this single webpage, so instead I mean to give some basic theory and application examples that would be relevant to one of my clients endeavoring a typical product development. Heat treating primarily refers to processing of metal parts after their manufacture process (machining, casting, forging, etc) . For most metals, exposure to specific temperatures and durations, as well as cooling and heating rates, can greatly effect the microstructure and properties of the base metal. The reason we do this is primarily for increasing the strength of the material, but heat treating can also be necessary for relieving internal stresses resulting from manufacturing processes that might cause premature failure of the part.

I find that alot of my clients get confused when requesting CAD files for their various prototyping and NPD activities.  This is because they generally don’t know what they actually need, and they don’t know what the different file types actually are.  This article is meant to describe all of the ‘important’ CAD file types […]