Designing a new part is one thing. Manufacturing it is a different story.
Talk with any customer of a CNC machine shop, and you’ll no-doubt hear an example of their part design being altered, refined, and/or improved thanks to a CNC manufacturing engineer. Of all the CNC engineering services provided by a machine shop, having an influence on the design itself may not be what you think of first.
Yet, without that insight, there’s no way to determine a part’s design for manufacturability (DFM). And, when you consider all the reasons why a part needs to be more manufacturable — to handle high volume production, to maintain high quality, to make the process easy and, the big one: to keep costs low — it’s clear that a CNC engineer’s modification of a part design is critical.
Let’s explore how that’s done and why it’s so valuable.