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‘Design Process’

Ideacious. Cuttin’ the Suck Out of the Design to Production Process.

31 Oct, 2011 by Josh Mings in DESIGN
3D Human CAD Models

You’ve got loads of ideas from portable candy launchers to cheese grating iPhone cases, but steps in the process (and your evil arch-nemesis Tim “criticizes everything” Jerksteen) has got your design mojo, motionless. Never fear! Another idea funding, “slam that design process in the face,” product site is here and it’s absolutely delicious… in fact, it’s Ideacious. While it has similarities to what you may have seen, they’re setting this up to be a shop that cuts through the craziness involved along the product production path and they’ve laid it all out very well. Take a look.

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How To Enhance Your Project Scope

09 Sep, 2011 by Bradley Derry in CULTURE, DESIGN, RESOURCES

Ah, the project scope. The crucial document many of us follow as a guideline while we’re designing or engineering the next greatest thing. Its entire existence is to keep the focus by describing in detail the new product’s soon to be features, costs, and milestone dates. Love them or hate them, many of us couldn’t work without one. I’ve written dozens of scopes and over the years I’ve learned how to make them even better. Here is a way to bring more meaning to this famous document and consequently the work we produce. I call it… the Last Page.

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Art to Part: Designing a Mountain Bike Handlebar for
Performance, Comfort – Part 1

10 Aug, 2011 by Bruce Buck in CAD, DESIGN

This is a guest post by Bruce Buck, avid photographer, videographer and workstation geek at MySolidBox.com.

There’s one constant in product design – the development of new products. Shocking and unexpected I know, but when that development gets down to all the individual component parts of a larger product, the process gets a whole lot more interesting. Welcome to the ‘Art to Part’ series where we’ll be looking at the details that go into the design from start to finish. Today, we have a part that you would think is fairly simple, a mountain bike handlebar. This one however, is aimed at completely changing the world of endurance/marathon racing.

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Fire Organ Shoots Flames. Gives Hope to Boring Guitar Hero Parties.

18 Jan, 2011 by Josh Mings in ROCKIN'

Your Guitar Hero party is about to get 1000 times cooler and 1000 times more flammable. What’s the one thing that can distract people from awful video game playing skills while at the same time scaring away rats, badminton players and night harpies that could gnaw your face off? FIRE, but you probably knew that.

Chris Marion knows everything it takes to turn ordinary Guitar Hero into a flamefest of epic proportion. All you need are some propane tanks, manifolds and an assortment of fittings to get started off. Chris steps you through all it takes to get there and use a little bit of Motley Crue to show you the results. FLAME ON.

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The Eerie Sound of the 3D Printed Flute… is Ear-gouging Beautiful.

06 Jan, 2011 by Josh Mings in FAB

I know.You were probably hoping to see my improvisational flute playing skills in this post. We’ll do that later when you have quick access to a bucket and some earplugs. Today, we’re looking at something that will go down as a turning point in 3D printing history, but not only 3D printing history… all those other histories as well.

For the first time, a fully functional flute has been printed. The process is what you would think – model, print, clean, but then… it’s played. In this case, it’s modeled in Rhino, printed on a Object printer and sounds… well, you’ll see.

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The Grit, the Gun, and the 4 Stages of Product Design Retribution

15 Dec, 2010 by Josh Mings in DESIGN

Click-click-click-click. You feel the cold steel against the back of your head. You’ll never forget that sound again… you know, if you survive. Back in the days of frontier life, hard winter nights and cattle drives the very distinct sound of a certain gun loading a bullet into the chamber encapsulated all the risks, restraint and recompense of the entire era.

Strange enough, the same can be applied directly to the head… the process, of product design. The interesting part of this is how you can see the progression of product design in a bullet being chambered. I’ll explain, but to start, it’s all set in motion by a modern day movie trailer, using product design from the 1800′s to reinforce the finality of a decision.

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Behind the Design: Making Machines that Eat Cars

20 Jul, 2010 by Josh Mings in DESIGN

We all know it. There are at least six programs that go into design process. That is, when there are more than five programs used. And with that, there’s a workflow that needs to be beat into submission. You’re about to see one that has been dealt with thusly.

You remember the design arsenal poll last week, right? The comment about using six different programs in the design process, which inspired that poll, came from none other than Bruce Buck, SolidSmack reader from the great city of San Antonio, Texas.

Now, he lays the process out for us – the design, the management and the rendering inside the company he works with, Metso Texas Shredder. As the name implies, they make machines that shred things, big things. Cars, for example. They have offices around the world that coordinate with each other on the engineering of the massive structures and they use NX, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Teamcenter, Keyshot and Shot to do it all.

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Rock the Process: DIY Camera Rig Design. So DIY, Even More Awesome

06 May, 2010 by Josh Mings in RESOURCES

The design process is something we absolutely CRAVE here at SolidSmack. You can throw up pretty pictures all day, but going behind the scenes and getting an idea of the work and thought that goes into a design… simply wonderful.

This is a perfect example. Jonathan Bergqvist wanted to have a shoulder mount for his Canon 7D. Fortunately for him, his pops is a skilled woodworker that can turn a raw stick of birch into a thing of beauty. From start to finish, here’s the process of Jonathan’s dad, Erik, creating the body, handles and focus mechanism for his son’s camera. How cool is that?

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Do You Use SolidWorks Concept Work to Rock Your Final Design? [Poll]

14 Apr, 2010 by Josh Mings in CULTURE

So, you’re sitting in a design review with a concept model of the product and the topic quickly changes to schedule. “You can just use that model for the engineering, right,” your boss asks confidently in front of the customer. Now, before your sweat glands burst and your eyes glaze over, rewind a few days.

There’s a discussion going on in the SolidWorks forum where good ol’ Mark Biasotti is asking how you use concepts for a final design and if SolidWorks is a good tool for doing so or if it needs improvements.

It’s a great question and reminds me of a method for creating concept designs we discussed a while back which allows you to try out different variations of a concept. But using that for engineering? Where do you stand?

[poll id="20"]

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Leonar3do 3D. 3D Design in 3D Space… That’s a lot of 3D.

12 Apr, 2010 by Josh Mings in TECH

Look at the guy outside your window swatting a swarm of wasps away from his exposed skin areas. Now look at the guy in the cubicle next to you using Leonar3do 3D. Both look similar except one is screaming and swelling up while the other is smiling and creating 3D object… in 3D space.

You may have seen Leonar3do a few months back. But recently, we caught up with Dániel Rátai and Zoltan Karpati, a couple of the guys behind the VR tech, to find out a little more about their product and how they think it could impact 3D mechanical design.
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