Assignment
Mechanical Engineering and Design

The assignment consisted of three lectures about the basics of Mechanical Engineering, production methods and material properties. Main learning point was to use force enclosure instead of form enclosure when designing an object. F.L.M. Delbressine explains how you can avoid making the classic mistakes that he has seen of Industrial Design students over the years. It helped me to think more logical about how form should be made also in my final bachelor project in order to make a more durable product.

For the assignment I designed and 3D-printed an small die cutting machine (stans in Dutch) which could make a certain pattern in your paper. It was an idea of my girlfriend who is studying at the Design Academy and submitted the idea to the Hema Design Challenge. But it required a detailed production method description and production costs. A perfect subject for this assignment.

I recreated the product in Solidworks based on her sketches. Also we had a small die cutter as example where I could see how the Mechanical designed the piece. You can say I learned by copying from the experts and gave my own twist on it. Different click mechanises to hold the product together, guiding groves to direct the button straight down. Every little piece of sticking out plastic had a function which I had to analyse and recreate.

A small project I did to get more familiar with materials was run a Solidworks simulation of a beer Christmas three. I had to see if the plastic would hold the weight of the beer bottles and still use as less material as possible. With different simulations I could see how the material responded and where it would bend and how much. It was not that complex to create a pretty realistic simulation. I could use this a lot when designing an industrial produced product.