Ever find yourself in need of a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) when evaluating a material, an adhesive or even a manufacturing consumable? You know that data sheet is somewhere out there on the web, but you just don't know where.

Maybe you don't know the substance's trade name, proper chemical name or the manufacturer. And even if you do know the manufacturer, it might be difficult to find it on that company's website — chemical and material supplier websites aren't known for their ease of navigation. Then, once you find the sheet, you may have to actually interpret all the chemistry acronyms and jargon.

A website run by Interactive Learning Paradigms Inc. can help with both the finding and the reading....Read More

The association formerly made the guide available on CD-ROM and in print for respective prices of $100 and $120. But the online version is free to all who register on the association's website http://rbi.ims.ca/4924-579. "The guide is already widely used by those who know die casting, but now we've made it available to anyone who wants to design die-cast parts" says Steve Udvardy, NADCA's director of research, education and technology.

Think of the guide as the Bible of die-...Read More

If you're like most of your engineering peers, you have a love-hate relationship with search engines. On the one hand, generic services like Google and Yahoo hold out the promise of fast access to free technical information. On the other, though, these sites rarely serve up the information you really need — at least not without a fight.

Consider the often-frustrating search for materials information. If you type "nylon" into Google, you'll get more than 15 million results. That long list might contain what you need. But first, you would have to sift through literally millions of useless results. "Some of them would be about pantyhose," says Mike Kmetz, president of IDES Inc., a specialist in plastics information. He's n...Read More