12 Key Design For Assembly Tips
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Look for the elegant solution.
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Choose Parts That Are Easier to Grasp and manipulate.
This tip is especially important if you’re designing a device that will be assembled by robots — which, in today’s manufacturing environment, is increasingly likely.
Parts that are very small, oddly shaped, slippery or otherwise difficult to grasp and manipulate are all more likely to cause problems with both human and automated assembly.
Flexible .
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Cots Parts Can Make Assembly Faster, Cheaper and easier.
Designing your device to be assembled with commercial off the shelf (COTS) parts is a great way to save time and money.
Many of a device’s key functionalcomponents like enclosures, springs, motors and gears can be bought off the shelf rather than made in-house.
These commercial parts are just as good as custom ones when purchased from a reputable s.
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Design and Use Parts with Built-In Fasteners Where possible.
Screws, bolts, nuts — they can have their place in a well-designed device.
But if you can design yours to do without, it will improve your design’s efficiency and ease of assembly.
Traditional fastenerssuch as nuts and bolts eat up enormous amounts of assembly time, and threaded fastenerscan be particularly labor-intensive.
Built-in fastenerssuch a.
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Find Ways to Create and Use Modular Assemblies in Your Designs.
Modular assemblies can be one of the biggest time-savers for your assembly process, especially if you’ve got a range of variant devices that can all use relatively similar modules.
Creating an ecosystem of modular assemblies is especially good for improving the efficiency and quality of automated device assembly.
As an added bonus, devices that use.
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Integrate DFM (Design For Manufacture) Principles.
The philosophies of designing for assemblyand designing for manufacturing are closely linked, since they both prioritize a streamlined and efficient process.
Design for manufacturing looks for time and cost savings in creating and procuring the parts used, while design for assemblyseeks to improve the process of actually assembling those parts.
The.
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Keep Your Tolerances realistic.
With modern machining technology, it’s possible to create parts within extremely fine tolerances — but just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to.
Parts that need more precision machining will take longer and be more expensive to make.
On top of that, creating a system that contains numerous parts with precise tolerancesincreases the likelihood.
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Minimize The Number of Different Parts and Part Sizes.
Take a look at your design’s part countand ask yourself whether every part is truly necessary.
Can multiple parts be consolidated into one.
Pay particular attention to parts that exist only to connect two other parts.
You can often eliminate these by joining the parts directly or using a single part.
The idea is to eliminate parts that can be made .
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What Is Design For Assembly?
Design for assemblyis a set of best practices for device design intended to make a product easier to assemble and manufacture.
DFAstrategies emphasize reducing part countand assembly stepswhile mistake-proofingthe assembly processas much as possible.
Fundamentally, design for assemblymeans keeping in mind that the device you’re designing now will o.