I’ve built a lot of products. 12 generations of iPods and their in-box earbuds and charging adapters, Nest’s Learning Thermostat and Protect smoke detectors, and Waymo’s self-driving cars to name a few. All of them were hard to build, but for different reasons. Apple’s products were certainly demanding in their mechanical and cosmetic tolerances, which made yields low and manufacturing expensive, but that wasn’t the only challenge. They were also extremely high volume which compounded the difficulty because any process we came up with had to also have high throughput, or at least it had to be possible to duplicate it many times to brute-force the problem of making enough of them.
When the first iPhone came out in 2007 high-quality, low(er)-cost contract manufacturing was only accessible by large companies with lots of money to spend. Foxconn, Pegatron, Quanta, and others like them wouldn’t even talk to you unless you had $50 Million to spend on tooling and parts. Startups and hobbyists had to rely either on small local shops which cost a fortune, or they had to make their products themselves, often by hand. But no more! Now even the most novice hobbyist can get anything made quickly for a reasonable price and I’m going to show you how.
Design Your Product
Computer-aided design (CAD) software used to cost thousands of dollars per user. The biggest and best systems still do, and if you are professional engineer working for a company you likely have a seat in a system like Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, CATIA, or Siemens NX. Those systems can create anything and you need that kind of power to design large assemblies, do finite-element analysis, and keep track of part revisions. But if you are a hobbyist or small business designing relatively simple products, you don’t need them. Nowadays there are free(!) options out there for CAD design and some of them are genuinely impressive.
My favorite one is Onshape. Having used remote desktop applications in the past to manipulate CAD on far-away machines, I’m still surprised that browser-based CAD works at all. Onshape works smoothly and has all the tools you need to create nearly any feature you could want. The only real shortcoming I will point out is that the 2D drawing tool is somewhat limited but it’s getting better all the time and I have always been able to work around any minor issues with it.
In addition to designing your own parts, there are databases with millions of models already created which you can just download and use. GrabCAD is the most popular of these with nearly 5.5 million CAD files available for download. If the part or assembly you need is already there, don’t bother modeling it yourself, just plug an existing model into your Onshape document, modify as needed, and you’re good to go.
If you are intending to use hardware parts from a supplier like McMaster-Carr, most of the time the CAD files for those parts are free to download from their website as well. Often when I’m designing something I have several choices of hardware to use and the deciding factor is whether or not the CAD is already available. If the function is the same, I will always choose the part I don’t have to model myself.
Find a Manufacturer
Okay, so now you have a model of the thing you want to get made. What do you actually do with it to make your virtual dreams real?
One of the more amazing (to me) developments of the last 10 years is the availability of professional manufacturing services to the general public. Several companies have identified that a lot of factories both in the US and overseas have idle capacity, which costs the factory money through both real costs (power, people, facilities rent) and opportunity costs (not generating revenue). By acting as a middle man to fill up that idle capacity with lots of smaller projects, they can charge for their service and everyone benefits. It’s a pretty good business model and it has the real benefit of bringing manufacturing capabilities to small business and hobbyists like us.
All of the best platforms have online quoting tools. You simply upload your CAD files and any associated 2D drawings, specify the material, process you would like, and quantity, and violá the algorithm will spit out a price and leadtime. Those two things are variable as well, so if you’re willing to have your parts manufactured overseas, to wait a little longer, or to buy more of them, then you can usually drive the price down pretty significantly. If your parts are more complicated, for example they have a lot of threaded holes or specific finishing requirements, then you can speak with the platform’s application engineers who can offer suggestions and manually quote your parts.
Material selection and manufacturing process also have a significant impact on price, but I will explore these choices in a followup post.
Here are a few of the best platforms available:
Fictiv was the first platform I was aware of to connect anyone who wanted it with established manufacturing services, particularly in China. Their network grew almost directly from the supply chains built by Apple, Samsung, and the rest of the major smartphone players. They were particularly early to the game of providing on-demand 3D printing services for rapid prototyping. If you’re looking for additive manufacturing or machining, there’s a good chance Fictiv can find a partner to make your stuff. The only roadblock I’ve run into with Fictiv is that they do not offer sheet cutting services.
Xometry are also very good at machining, but their costs tend to be higher for low-volume orders. However, if you can order in quantities of 30-50 or more, then they might be a really good fit for your needs. Another differentiator is that Xometry offer sheet cutting services and Fictiv do not. If can make your parts from a flat sheet of metal or plastic, then this is my preferred option.
I have less experience with Fast Radius but they have a very mature platform and many of the same capabilities as the two companies above. They are certainly worth considering for a comparison quote and may be able to deliver your parts faster or at a better price than the others at any given time simply due to having a different network.
Conclusion
I can’t tell you what to make, but once you know what you need made, this is the easiest path to getting it in your hand. This overview barely scratches the surface but hopefully it will point you in the right direction and empower you to try making things on your own. In future posts I will explore more of the ins and outs of manufacturing in 2023 and beyond and hopefully together we can help create a future that is a little less stupid.
Disclaimer: I have no commercial relationship with any of the companies mentioned in this post. I have no financial incentive to endorse them, I’ve just had positive experiences with them in the past and want to help people get things made. I do not receive compensation of any kind from these companies for either clicking these links or placing orders with them.
