One cool way to make enclosures for short production runs (say less than 10,000) is plastics fabrication. When most people hear about plastics fabrication they think of signage, or a fairly butchered kind of plastics carpentry. That’s not what I’m talking about.
There’s a relatively new technology that combines sophisticated use of CAD engineering with production techniques borrowed from the sheet metal and cabinet-making businesses. Plastic sheet, such as ABS alloy, is machined to create vents or recesses, and then pieces are cut from a large plastic sheet (as large as four feet by eight feet). Joint and edge detail is then performed on a routing machine. Pieces are then scored on a table saw for bending with heat in a custom machine and assembled with a solvent-bonding process. That’s a quick summary of the process used by one of the manufacturers, Toolless Plastics Solutions in the Seattle.area
The technique goes back to 1985 when French engineer Jean Claude Antoine needed small numbers of housings for stage lighting. The tool-less supplier with the longest track record in the USA is a New Jersey company called Plastronic Enclosures, Inc. I had a conversation this morning with President Daniel L Cucchiara who says that PEI has some unique capabilities in software, shielding and other areas. For example, PEI has equipment that can cut shapes from four foot by eight foot sheet, which gives them advantages in time and economics. Cucchiara says he welcomes the competition because it has spurred interest in the process from design engineers. CEO and Founder Patrick Oltmanns at ClickFold Plastics in Charlotte, NC, says demand is booming from OEMs who want low volumes of electronics enclosures for medical applications. ClickFold offers an excellent FAQ section that explains process capabilities. New at Toolless Plastics Solutions is the ability to produce curved pieces, using a heated roller technology deeloped by its parent company in France, LTP.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
The airframe of Airbus's A350 XWB consists of a bigger proportion of carbon-fiber-reinforced composite structures than any other commercial jet to date: over 53 percent by weight.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
16 
