Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
(Source: Image by Kipp Bradford)
Figure 13.5
Insulation samples that were critical for detecting a manufacturing flaw.
The factory will also make decisions that its engineers think are unimportant as they
design the production tooling to minimize their own costs. If you don't specify and com-
municate every last detail, you may find what you consider small flaws in your parts that
resulted from manufacturing optimizations or manufacturing decisions made by the fact-
ory without you being in the loop. Here are a few examples from Kickstarter projects I've
backed:
“The good news is that we received the first plastic samples coming out of our in-
jection factory. However, these samples had a lot of cosmetic problems and the
quality was well below the standard we would want to have…”
“We are going back and forth with our vendor to dial the tolerance in. It looks like
they should be able to meet us halfway on our tolerance request…”
“It seems the particular aluminum alloy the metal fabricator is using cannot take
colored anodization, which made us go to baked enamel. And the enamel is prov-
ing difficult too, partially because of the smallness of the part…”
