Free Software
Hi,
For those of you who design simple parts for manufacturing, have a look at "emachineshop.com".
The CAD program is free, you design your part and the quotation is produced on the spot. Enter your credit card number and the parts turn up. These can be machined parts or even injection moulded.
The CAD program looks primitive, but it only took half and hour to draw a part with a difficult profile, add some pillars inside it for mounting a PCB and some external features for mounting the unit on a wall. You can look at it in 3D and rotate it.
Well impressed!
We used a similar service to get some engraved front panels made and the results were brilliant; first class engraving of text and an hpgl logo, multiple colours etc, all for 70 Euros delivered to UK. My local machinist says its as good as he can do and cheaper, it will free him up to do complex stuff.
The world is changing!
For those of you who design simple parts for manufacturing, have a look at "emachineshop.com".
The CAD program is free, you design your part and the quotation is produced on the spot. Enter your credit card number and the parts turn up. These can be machined parts or even injection moulded.
The CAD program looks primitive, but it only took half and hour to draw a part with a difficult profile, add some pillars inside it for mounting a PCB and some external features for mounting the unit on a wall. You can look at it in 3D and rotate it.
Well impressed!
We used a similar service to get some engraved front panels made and the results were brilliant; first class engraving of text and an hpgl logo, multiple colours etc, all for 70 Euros delivered to UK. My local machinist says its as good as he can do and cheaper, it will free him up to do complex stuff.
The world is changing!
Not so silly with larger quantities.
We costed a dust cap for an antenna connection and designed a nice one using the free software. In quantities of 1,000 or more it was cheaper than the off the shelf part we already using and did not like. (It fell off too easily.)
In a commercial context you need to cost the time it takes to make special parts as well as adding in the design time and tooling costs. If you do this you can find the real cost of a little widget can be very high. Alternatively you can have your guy free to do what he is expert at while a subcontractor does what he is expert at.
We costed a dust cap for an antenna connection and designed a nice one using the free software. In quantities of 1,000 or more it was cheaper than the off the shelf part we already using and did not like. (It fell off too easily.)
In a commercial context you need to cost the time it takes to make special parts as well as adding in the design time and tooling costs. If you do this you can find the real cost of a little widget can be very high. Alternatively you can have your guy free to do what he is expert at while a subcontractor does what he is expert at.