Online course

Design for Manufacturing and Assembly: From Prototype to Production

A practical course on designing parts and products that can actually be made, assembled, tested, and serviced at the volume and cost you need. Written by a practising manufacturing engineer for engineers with roughly zero to five years of experience.

Who this is for

You know CAD. You know the basic processes. What you have probably not yet lived through is a supplier DFM review that rejects your part, a tolerance stack-up that fails at production validation, or a production ramp that stalls because a screw is hard to reach. This course is the set of rules and reasons that get you through those events with fewer surprises.

Every rule of thumb in the course comes with the physical reason behind it, so you can rebuild the rule when a supplier's numbers differ from ours. Every real-world example is cited to a source you can read yourself. Where a widely repeated claim could not be verified, the course says so instead of attaching false precision to it.

Your progress

Modules

All seventeen modules are published. Work through them in order if you can; the process modules (4 to 9) stand alone, but the capstone assumes everything before it. A module whose quiz you have passed on this device is marked Completed.

How to use this course

1. Work in order the first time. Modules 0 to 3 set up the vocabulary and the tolerancing and capability ideas that every process module leans on. After that, the process modules (4 to 9) can be read in any order.
2. Do the worked exercise before opening the solution. Each exercise is a calculation you would do on the job: a stack-up, a break-even, a wall-thickness redesign, a part-count reduction. The full solution is in a collapsible block below it.
3. Take the quiz. Six to ten questions per module. Score 70% or more and the module is marked complete on this device. Progress is stored only in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
4. Use the design rules tables as a checklist. Every row has a source. When your supplier's numbers differ, trust the supplier for their process and use the reason column to understand why.
5. Print a module as a handout. The print stylesheet removes navigation and expands the collapsible blocks.

Conventions

• All dimensions are metric. Where a source gives inches or mils, the metric value is shown first and the original follows in parentheses.
• Inline citations like [3] link to the References section at the end of each module. Sources marked "secondary" are credible but were not read in the original by the author of the course; everything else was.
• Examples labelled "illustrative" use invented but realistic numbers and are not real programs. Real cases are named and cited.
• "Suppliers vary on this; ask yours" appears often. It is the honest answer more often than a single number.

Prerequisites

Basic statistics (mean, standard deviation), reading engineering drawings, and unit conversion. Every acronym is defined on first use and every standard is introduced the first time it appears.