how much cad do you really do at work?
how much cad is actually used as the final tooled surface?
how much cad gets rebuilt by your engineering staff or your clients engineering staff?
if you are a student please note that you are a student. if you are not a student please note how long you have been working.
to get this started I have about 9 years of experience. currently I do a lot of cad and 90percent gets tooled.
Depends a little on the client, but I generally send a database and control drawing directly to the tooler. If anything has to change I make the change and re-submit – the only exceptions are very simple mods like pin switchouts.
Been working 2.5 years, probably spend 60% of my time doing CAD.
depends on the environment i’ve worked in. early in my career i did a LOT of cad and renderings. some positions i’ve held were 90% cad, 10% sketching. the longer i go into my career, the less i use it, but the more important it becomes. currently, (after 8 years) 90% of my job is sketching on a tablet, 10% is cad, and that stuff is tooled directly from my work. because of this flexibility, i sometimes have help out engineering when they get overbooked and completely engineer my designs right down to the hardware, spec sheets and BOM. over the years, i’ve been trained in 7 CAD programs either in school or on the job.
I go from no CAD at the start of a project with just maybe the odd simple model to lots of CAD towards the end. I know guys who don’t touch it as they have a team to do there CAD…if only!
It all depends on what you want to call CAD. My boss calls Illustrator “CAD”. I believe CAD to be 3D modeling (e.g. SolidWorks). If you were to use his term, then 85% of my work is CAD.
CAD = 3D cad
could be solidworks, alias, rhino, proE, Catia, vellum 3D, soliddesigner or any program that generates 3D forms (but not polygon tools like 3Dmax or maya).
Totally dependent on the job and client I’m working for.
When the project requires CAD I do all of it and I would say 95% get’s tooled (ME’s usually build directly onto / into our external solids, which are built fully manufacturable / drafted etc.).
Could not agree more, and it is a waste of time and money.
Our designers take a large majority of our project to about 90-95% tooling ready. We do a lot of hand drawing and a lot of 3D CAD work.
What industry are you in?
In my industry of medical device design it would be insane for designers to do this. ME’s spend the bulk of their time engineering, and they do it in CAD. Everything from mechanisms, FEA, design for assembly, radiation shielding, materials selection, venting, IPX standards, component mounting etc.
Rather than play engineer, we focus on what people want and need, then work closely with engineering to realize it.
The only time we’ll touch CAD is as a design tool, not a production tool.
Main focus on the same industry. we utilize SWX and Pro depending on client…but no matter how finished the CAD is the clients engineers always rebuild it 3-4 times after we submit our files…Low level engineer adds internals, higher level then rebuilds it, senior level then rebuilds it, he may rebuild it again. We have 10+ medical/surgical clients all seam to do it.
So now we only create the external surface and leave it at that. However on the consumer and home health side it is usually used directly
Mostly consumer products. Some medical here and there. It has been my experience that if we design and guide through manufacturing, we have greater success getting our designs to market. In the past, when we did not complete as much CAD, the products always seem to fade. Designing smart parts, accounting for draft, assembly, rib, joint and boss location gives us more control.
As I mentioned, we rarely complete our files for tooling. We take them to a good level. Engineers at our clients finish them.
Used to do the complete part design, part seporations…draft…bosses…ect. Then we found out the clients rebuild everything from scratch regaurdless. The final product is still 95%-98% our intent, but now we save time on the back end and focus it on the upfront.
You are correct. If that is the experience. Our clients currently do not rebuild our files. If they did, then they would only get surfaces or nominal wall parts.
From my experience it becomes the exact opposite! Perhaps this all depends who and where your ME work is done.
My belief is if you are shipping work to ME’s in the Far East you do not want them to recreate your data.
They don’t see why details are important to the designer / client / customer and simply degrade the intent. As a general rule ME’s in these locations tend to want to get things done super fast and will take as many short cuts they can, therefore they will not ‘sweet’ your beautiful free form detailing and you end up with a extruded and blended version.
If you have ME’s in-house or in Europe or US this often isn’t the case because they understand the role of the design and his/her fit with the ME.
Yeah that is what one client said… For some quality certification and liability waiver the engineering needs to go through at least 3 rebuilds by sepporate individuals. A prior client did the same thing in the fishing reel industry…to the extream that the three engineers were in differenty countries. First in the US, second in France, third in Germany or Switzerland depending on the product line.
PD_BG,
Great point, CG and I are jaded by the industry that we work.
From my experience it becomes the exact opposite! Perhaps this all depends who and where your ME work is done.
My belief is if you are shipping work to ME’s in the Far East you do not want them to recreate your data.
They don’t see why details are important to the designer / client / customer and simply degrade the intent. As a general rule ME’s in these locations tend to want to get things done super fast and will take as many short cuts they can, therefore they will not ‘sweet’ your beautiful free form detailing and you end up with a extruded and blended version.
If you have ME’s in-house or in Europe or US this often isn’t the case because they understand the role of the design and his/her fit with the ME.[/quote]
