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Springs are absolutely everywhere, from jewelry clasps to large industrial robots. The probability of a fresh-out-of-school mechanical engineer encountering his or her first spring design problem within the first year of graduating is not 100%, but it’s pretty high. Most of the time, it’s not practical to go straight into making a custom spring in […]

While electric motors drive vastly different applications, their core function remains the same—to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. Numerous articles highlight the characteristics of each unique motor on the market, but they can be simplified into two overarching categories: AC (alternating current) motors and DC (direct current) motors. Each type has its own pros […]

A new engineer, I was getting used to the “excitement” of cubicle life when something (finally) happened. We’d stiffened part of our flow meters a month prior, and one of our customers started complaining about breakage. The graybeards upstairs were defending the change, while my engineering partner was struggling to explain why the minor tweak […]

Engineering drawings are a great way to communicate design intent for CNC machined parts that require tight tolerances or other special requirements. Many of our customers in robotics, aerospace, automotive, and medical device industries attach drawings to their parts when uploading to the Fictiv platform. That said, not all engineers receive comprehensive training on how […]

Springs are ubiquitous in all kinds of machines—from consumer products to heavy industrial equipment, take apart anything that involves a mechanism, and chances are, you’ll find a spring inside. Springs are storage devices for mechanical energy—think of them as analogous to batteries! The earliest spring-driven clocks appeared in the 1400s. Fast-forward some 600 years, you […]

We recently hosted an awesome live teardown event with Andrew Zee, Engineering Director and Terence Kwan, Senior Industrial Designer at LUNAR. Throughout the teardown, Andrew and Terence share their insider’s perspectives on the product design secrets behind the development of Alpine Headphones. During the live online teardown, Andrew and Terence walk through the unique industrial design […]

At 8pm on Thursday, March 2, 2017, a long line of loyal Nintendo fans and eBay resellers already formed around the block at San Francisco’s SOMA Best Buy. The new Nintendo Switch dropped at midnight on March 3. Naturally, we got in line, but unlike most fans who went home and played Zelda all night […]

Remember the days of flip phones and physical alpha-numeric keys, where you pressed physical buttons to enter phone numbers and send text messages? We’ve come a long way since then, with modern smartphones and replacing buttons with capacitive touchscreens. Despite the technological advances, there’s something I miss about those physical keys. Maybe it was the […]

While electric motors serve vastly different purposes, their core function remains the same—to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. Numerous articles highlight the characteristics of each unique motor on the market, but they can be simplified into two overarching categories: AC (alternating current) motors and DC (direct current) motors. Each type has its own pros […]

In the world of mechanical product design, engineers and designers complete what is known as a tolerance analysis or tolerance stack up analysis on an assembly as they prepare to send the components out for manufacturing. This is done to ensure when you order parts, they are manufactured to dimensions that guarantee the components within an assembly […]