Some Design Advice

[JHCC]

A college friend who works for NASA (as a civilian contractor, not a government employee) posted the following on Facebook; I'm sharing it here with his permission.

Quote

Teaching NASA summer interns about mechanical design. I wrote them a summary of the lesson, and think you all might enjoy it too.

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General lessons for design:

1. Use symmetry first, then geometrical relations, and only then apply numerical dimensions.

 

2. Listen to your inner design voice. If you feel like it would be better if you did some particular step or used some particular dimension, even if you can't explain why it's better, go with the impulse, unless there are compelling reasons not to. Not listening to your inner voice when it is small will often lead to some design decision biting you later, when the inner voice has to yell to get your attention.

 

3. Name your parts and assemblies with unique and meaningful titles, so that when you come back to some design project 3 months or several years later you have left yourself names that guide you back to the specific design idea you were working on. Unique and descriptive names also make it vastly easier to search meaningfully for work that you did in the past, to save yourself from duplicating work in the present.

 

-- Paul Mirel, Instrument Systems Engineer, NASA-GSFC/ Hexagon US Federal. 

 

[BillyBones]

Listening to your inner voice is a good idea in just about any decision you make. The amount of times i regret not doing so is countless and has led me down some troubled paths. 

[Scott NC]

  You do tend to crash harder when your inner voice is wrong.  Nobody or anything else to blame. 

[George N. M.]

The advice about naming parts so that you can figure things out down the road is similar to what I do with my bench book.  When I am working on something that I think I may repeat in the future I write instructions to my future self, dimensions, step by step process, things and problems to watch out for, and anything else to make things easier for myself somewhere down the time stream.  It has really helped over the years.  I can recall a lot but there are sometimes significant details that evaporate, particularly dimensions, and having it written down helps a lot.  I also include in the book useful information and measurements, e.g. recently someone posted the dimensions for different size stock for Fredrich's crosses and I copied it into the bench book.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Goods]

Listening to my inner voice usually ends up with me spending may more hours on any given forging project than most others would spend! However, I don’t think I would be happy with them any other way… Thankfully, it’s my hobby, not my source of income.

Keep it fun,

David

[Frosty]

I let my voices argue it out and vote, I'm usually happier if I don't get too involved till it's time to start hitting stuff.

Frosty The Lucky.