Design For Manufacturing - DFM Course 11 Design for Manual Assembly Part 1: Techniques

In this Design for Manufacturing lecture, we are going to cover Design for Assembly. Much of the inspiration for this lecture comes from the following references.

Designing Plastic Parts for Assembly
- The Dragon Innovation team mostly deals with injection molded parts and due to their nature, there are a lot of ways that you can stick them together. Within this course, we will cover ultrasonic welding, glue and screw, spring clips, and more.
Product Design for Manufacturing and Assembly
- The grand-daddy of them all by Boothroyd & Dewhurst. Many of the examples from this lecture will be from this book.

The way to think about Design for Assembly is reducing the part count and minimizing the amount of time for assembly. Reducing both of those factors results in a more efficient design.

So you might ask: Why is it important to reduce part count? Reducing part count takes more effort than just designing the product the first way you design it. There are a lot of good reasons. One is the fewer parts you have, the fewer fixtures you need to measure the quality of them (i.e., Are they within spec or not within spec?). Also, every time you put together a part there is typically one type of fixture holding one part to the other one. If you don't have a part, you don't have to build and maintain that fixture.

You can view the full video and accompanying slides below.

Click here to continue to Design for Manufacturing Course 11: Part 2: Boothroyd Dewhurst Method >>