How a car is created. One would think that designing a car would be a process of creating drawings and then transferring the drawings to sheet metal. Which is. But there are some intermediate steps to the process and the best way that car designers have found over the century or so of designing cars is to first create the car in clay.
I want to talk about sheet metal and making sheet metal parts. Now for a variety of reasons the maker community has avoided using sheet metal in their project and that’s a mistake. I see a lot of maker designed machines that use thick plastic panels where I, as designer would have used a formed sheet metal panel.
One hazard for a design is that once it’s released to the world, somebody, especially in Shenzhen is going to try to copy it.
Solidsmack linked to an interesting video on the design of the new Nerf Blasters.
Streamlining of trains to reduce drag starts back in the 1890’s with Frederick Adams experiments on the B&O, which was not really very impressed at the time.
When doing a performance test you have to know what to test. Consider this video. It attempts to show how the German bearing is better than the Chinese bearing.
What is good design? Reading the article below, Mr. Dyson would have you believe that good design mean paring things down, being energy efficient as possible, being green even at the expense of lower costs. I’m not sure that that’s always the case.