This is the type of stuff that trips up many Kickstarter / crowd funded projects.
"I have a great idea, I'll just manufacture it in China and sell it as a product!"
This is a great overview of the process and complexity for *one part* of the manufacturing process for bringing a product to market and almost all of them are as complex (or more) and have pitfalls of their own. Add on wiring harness mfg, PCB/PCBA, machined parts, compliance testing, final assembly, QA testing, and revision management and then you're about halfway to running a successful product business.
From personal experience, the best advice in the article is to hire a domain expert when moving into a field you aren't intimately familiar with. Employing them for as little as a few months can help you avoid several years of very expensive lessons as you figure a new process out.
Author here. Yes I agree with you. Having your own mold expert really saves a ton of money and makes things much more smoothly. We work with a great engineer based in the Philippines. You can contact me [1] and I can connect you with him.
I wonder why with things like this people don’t get that it involves real experience and expertise to get parts made correctly. Surely there are people offering their services to avoid these mistakes who have the relevant skills. Making things is much harder than software in some really important ways, are these computer programmers demonstrating hubris?
In my experience, if a company is majority software, it's a weird combination of hubris and ignorance that I don't really see in other sectors.
I consult on product development and I'd say about 50% the time, software majority companies think you are trying to rip them off somehow when you try to explain everything that is NOT software that needs to be done, what it costs and how long it takes (and how important it is to lock things in early as you can't just "push out a patch" for a $50,000 molding tool or that you can't just "slap bluetooth in later" and not redo all of your EMC certs).
> are these computer programmers demonstrating hubris?
Yes, but not in a way that's unique to programmers.
People often underestimate the effort a job entails, be it teaching, sales, programming, graphic design, machining, car repair vet medicine, etc.
Most of my career history, when I've heard someone say "ugh, department X just sits around all day and occasionally does Y", they're assuming that the sliver of their insight into department X is the totality of what is actually done.
There are. It’s an entire domain: industrial design. Just like software there’s both in-house roles and consultants.
The depth of knowledge required to do it well warrants full university degrees in the topic. As with most things, you can probably take the autodidact route but be prepared to make a lot of mistakes. Also be prepared for those mistakes to cost 5 or 6 figures. The ease and almost zero cost of exploration and learning from failure that software allows does not always map to other domains. This is one of them.
Source: partner is an industrial designer and geeks out on plastics, materials science and manufacturing techniques way harder than obsessions I pursue. It’s literally her entire world and she still fucks up occasionally too.
I would guess that people assume more abstraction layers stand between them and the process than there actually do — that “getting something manufactured” is more like using PaaS than like using IaaS.
Which is, honestly, kind of a reasonable assumption. In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor? Because all such people are too busy running their own successful product businesses?
Their main problem seems to be that they had never thought about how injection molding works, but started a CAD path to a product that would need to be injection molded. Anyone who has built plastic models could have told them a lot of this information, and it's a bit surprising that they had to learn by doing at that stage.
It’s not always easy to find a mold wizard at short notice. Things in hardware space are more word of mouth and relationship based. And as others said you don’t know what you don’t know. I had a (mechanical engineer!) boss who was happy to 3D print and ignore mold DFM against our mechanical contractors advice until he finally did a mold estimate and realized it would cost half a mil to make the current design.
I think it's a combination of not knowing what you don't know but also the huge amount of exposure we've all had to injection moulded plastic products we've all had throughout our lives. The ubiquity and low cost of plastic products makes it seem that they must not be hard to produce.
A lot of people are saying "hubris" without really drilling into what the arrogant mistake is. For the record, I don't think its unique to computer programmers, but rather to people who solve complex problems for a living, and consider themselves, at some level, to be decently smart.
It is very easy to convince yourself that you understand something because you read a lot about it, and what you read makes intuitive sense. But that is not at all the same as actually going out and doing the thing, and solving the problem from the blue sky. Dunning-Kruger sort-of describes this, but I believe that there's a multi-dimensionality issue where being on the good side of Mt. Stupid in one domain makes you overrate your capabilities in other domains. Vis the nuclear physicist disputing the official explanation of how the buildings collapsed on 9/11, apparently because he hadn't gotten to the part of the freshman material science course that covered how yield strength decreases with temperature.
So articles like this are important, even as they are kind of obvious to people who have already learned these lessons, because often times it takes learning these things the hard way to understand why (for instance) the software is actually the easy part of an IoT thingy.
100% a lot of the issues they mote are things you would expect to catch in the design phase even with a single design review with an experience mechanical design engineer
How many hw startups start with "we'll just ship an Arduino/RPi with our custom module and that's it" heh, that's very not ideal for a variety of reasons
Keyboard.io's blog has in great detail, all the problems, wins with working with Chinese manufactuerers from wood workers, plastic injection, assembly, etc.
Highly recommend it because they give a lot of details and if you start from the beginning you can really see how they learned how difficult it was in going into the space. The multiple visits, quality control, the issues with who owns what, and where they lost money.
Does one of their lessons-learned include to hire proper engineers and supply chain peoole with experience in China / with Chinese manufacturers? Ideally all the way up to, say, COO, and give those people tze necessary authority to run things? Because if not, it is just a collection of anecdotes of the clueless, a collection that is used for content marketing...
" it is just a collection of anecdotes of the clueless"
But those are the entertaining ones innit. What fun is it to read a blog (like OP) that says 'yeah we hired a bunch of experienced professionals and we didn't have any problems'. No, we want to read stories of 'so I forgot about one detail and the manufacturer completely misunderstood us so I had to fly to China and spend 100k to get it fixed and it still was 3 months late'.
By the time you do all that, effectively moved in to the Design By Committee Industry, what distinguishes your widget from ACME Big Widget Co & Sons.
And employing all those people doesn't guarantee success, but it does guarantee your failures will cost a lot.
You'd probably want to only attempt making something like this as a vanity project, where it matters less if you fail, and thereby half the fun is navigating the path to success by yoursel[f/ves].
I mean, we're a two person company. I can assure you that all that writing wasn't about content marketing.
But, just for completeness sake, the list of people who got blindsided by the con artist who was ultimately behind a lot of the crazy included both our experienced local on-the-ground project manager and the factory owner.
My dad was (amongst many other things) a toolmaker who made plastic injection molds. These things can be hideously complicated, especially if the designer doesn't understand how it will actually be built, and as a result he once spent a year on one. In his days everything was manual, no CNC, no 3D models, no simulations, and probably no contact with the designer to make improvements.
He had to cut milling bits with custom profiles to cut custom tools such as a series of graphite and copper spark eroder forms to cut just some of the corners and shapes in the (paper) technical drawings, then repeat for the next ill-advised bevel or interior sharp angle or even lettering which is too close together to get a milling bit inbetween two letters. Figuring that out was his responsibility alone. Instead of computer control, he'd have to do something like first create a scale model of part of the tool out of a block of plastic, then use a pantograph (a mechanical linkage allowing you to trace a shape with a pen and have the movement magnified/minified) to copy the shapes on a milling machine -- even shapes that seem simple. And then maybe throw away (actually, take home as a souvenir) a month or two's work if you cut slightly too deep -- these were high precision parts. Not because the plastic had to be so precise, but because the completed dies are made out of many steel parts that have to fit tightly together and slide past each other, as you can see in the article.
Considering the ~two months quoted in the article for this mold, I'd think a lot of that complexity is still essential despite modern computerized machining. I'm sure a great deal of ingenuity and many steps are still needed.
Addendum: I asked my dad and he said what I overlooked is that it takes far less thought and skill to make a mold or other tool today not just because of CNC (to cut paths you can't by manually turning knobs), but because of the algorithms that plan out how to make it.
One day I looked around at all the plastics in life - in particular looking at the plastic cases of vintage computers, and I realised that plastics is absolutely incredible. Often really beautiful when you think about it, incredibly precise, with beautiful lines and curves.
I've come to find plastics really quite interesting. It's kind of a magic material.
And at the same time it's a sort of like King Midas in which humanity gets this incredible material but now there's plastic everywhere polluting everything. Everything we touch is turning to plastic.
I had a different sort of event looking at the plastic in my life. More like, whats the point of this, other than to save the manufacturer costs? I'm convinced there's nothing I own thats made of plastic that my grandparents didn't have a much nicer all metal or wood version. Not to mention its unrepeatable and tends to get brittle with age. So much plastic stuff I have is straight up junk that's just going to fall apart in a few years. Meanwhile you can have a metal can opener thats 80 years old and works as good as new.
This is generally an argument that has merit only if you can ignore cost and care completely.
Yes, silk parachutes exist. But there was a reason why nylon was revolutionary - it was orders of magnitude cheaper and required a lot less care.
> Not to mention its unrepeatable and tends to get brittle with age. Meanwhile you can have a metal can opener thats 80 years old and works as good as new.
Plenty of metal can openers that are rusted, bent out of shape, or corroded enough to be unusable.
Plastic only usually gets brittle if it is left in sunlight (and not always then). Not sure what "unrepeatable" means in this context, but plastic is usually at least as repairable as wood or metal by using resin. Indeed, both wood and metal is often repaired by using resin based fillers.
IMHO planned obsolescence and shorter design lifetimes is orthogonal to developments in plastics. There's a correlation but not causation.
While metals are known for their strength and temperature resistance, they are also prone to corrosion.
There are plenty of decades-old plastic parts in continued service everywhere, that you just aren't aware of because they haven't alerted you to their presence by failing.
There's some element of survivor's bias here. You only see the items that survived long enough and draw a conclusion on all the products they had then. Also the price/income ratio for any such item might have been quite different.
Beyond this, metal too has serious resource and energy implications. Think mining, smelting, production of the final shape, treatment against rust, paint, transport, etc. There are many steps, many inputs (notably chemicals and energy), and quite some demanding work going into it.
I have no answer to these questions: is it more or less resource efficient to produce 20 plastic can openers or 1 metal can opener? Is it more/less environmentally harmful? Is it more/less socially harmful?
This may be close to true if you don't have need for much (or any) health care.
A large number of modern medical treatments would be nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive without plastics, mostly for sterile use reasons. These use cases have saved countless lives. I'm not sure how you'd even begin tallying a count.
Don't be so down and depressed. This is not in defense of plastics but flip it around. If we were still making things out of wood and metal the items would be incredibly expensive due to the labor and resource cost.
I equally dislike all the plastic junk that is bought for a couple bucks that are basically use for a moment and become trash. There are also amazingly wonderful things made out of plastic that last a long time when taken care of. Heck I still have toys from 30 years ago that were made out of plastic that are still in pretty good darn shape because they do not hit the sun. My rice cooker has a plastic shell and has lasted a long time. Same with my difference keyboards.
Be aware of your consumption but don't let it drag you down.
I’ve been a big fan most of my life and it was / is my favorite toy product by far, but only as I got older, I realized how the whole system is not just brilliantly designed, but the mechanical _execution_ of the parts is at least just as impressive.
…And that it wouldn’t be possible without plastics. No other type of material could ever achieve such durability, flexibility and precision; and that’s not even considering costs – no other materials _period_.
LEGO is a perfect example of a product designed AROUND plastics – not something turned to plastics to lower costs.
> …And that it wouldn’t be possible without plastics. No other type of material could ever achieve such durability, flexibility and precision; and that’s not even considering costs – no other materials _period_.
Mokulock may not be identical or cost the same, but it's basically the same product without plastic. They don't snap together or come apart as easily, but I like the idea of it. I'd love to see LEGO done in metal too.
Is there a lego inspired solution to industrial design, specifically mechanical mechanisms? I have had a product in mind that is quite intricate with several possible configurations. I personally haven't excercised my 3d muscles as much over the years and I find cad with 3d printing to be not as intuitive as snapping parts together.
This was famously an issue with the original NeXT Cube:
Recounted in an article in Fast Company:
As Isaacson relates in Steve Jobs, most parts cast in molds have an angle that is slightly greater than 90 degrees, because the extra degrees make it much easier to get the parts out of the mold. That’s the kind of compromise neither Esslinger or Jobs was willing to make for the NeXT, arguing it would ruin the “purity and perfection” of the NeXT cube. So the sides had to be produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a specialty machine shop in Chicago.
This was also the case with the 1st gen version of the iPod Shuffle [0], as a friend who worked at IDEO at the time pointed out. Perfect 90 degree angles.
> using molds that cost $650,000, at a specialty machine shop
Just because the mold was really expensive doesn't mean that the marginal cost of each unit created by it is more than a unit produced by a cheap mold. In many cases, the marginal cost is significantly less as you are able to use less raw material thanks to variable thicknesses, etc. There's a break-even point where the expensive mold becomes cheaper/better and that's another area where experienced manufacturing consultants help out.
Do you know if this is explained in detail somewhere? Both Wikipedia (English / German) and various websites only repeat that you need an angle "to lift the mold and to avoid stress cracks", but none seems to explain why. (My guess for the "exit" part is friction due to imperfect mold/part surfaces, but so far I can only guess)
Short answer is 3 degrees draft is pretty safe most of the time, assuming you have some texturing. A shallower texture means you can get away with a bit less draft and vice versa.
The reason is that you want the tool to release the piece and not get bound up. Shape and cooling also factor in, but for simple box type shapes with no large cutouts, this is usually predictable.
Here's a story [1] of a company that found that the Taiwanese plastic company that made its custom parts stopped responding after 15 years. They got another one of their Taiwanese suppliers to go to the plastic company to see what was going on--and found that the factory was now a hotel and the sales office was a now a strip mall.
Its a nice article regardless if you're going to manufacture in China or anywhere else, but a crucial bit of information for China manufacturing is missing. What about IP theft? Does keeping your mold make it more difficult for people wanting to make knockoffs of your parts? Does moving it to a different plastic injection part maker help? Is there anything you can do, or is it essentially something you account for when "manufacturing in China" and you send them components you don't really care that much about?
Just out of curiosity, did you investigate how much more expensive it would be to have molds made somewhere in the West? Is that even available at all for relatively small and inexpensive molds/projects/orders like yours?
Smart companies operating in CN seeking to minimise IP theft tend to "Own" the mold, and carefully manage its use and production - to ensure that there are e.g. no 3rd shift production "overruns". Producing the mold separately from the factory which uses it is not unknown, as is having a western employee tallying what comes off the production line. Molds at the end of their useful life (either because the item is no longer in production, or the mold is worn out) should be physically destroyed, and that destruction verified (angle grinder cutting it up is not uncommon - with a western staffperson overseeing that destruction.).
Readit News
"I have a great idea, I'll just manufacture it in China and sell it as a product!"
This is a great overview of the process and complexity for *one part* of the manufacturing process for bringing a product to market and almost all of them are as complex (or more) and have pitfalls of their own. Add on wiring harness mfg, PCB/PCBA, machined parts, compliance testing, final assembly, QA testing, and revision management and then you're about halfway to running a successful product business.
From personal experience, the best advice in the article is to hire a domain expert when moving into a field you aren't intimately familiar with. Employing them for as little as a few months can help you avoid several years of very expensive lessons as you figure a new process out.
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/support/
I consult on product development and I'd say about 50% the time, software majority companies think you are trying to rip them off somehow when you try to explain everything that is NOT software that needs to be done, what it costs and how long it takes (and how important it is to lock things in early as you can't just "push out a patch" for a $50,000 molding tool or that you can't just "slap bluetooth in later" and not redo all of your EMC certs).
Yes, but not in a way that's unique to programmers.
People often underestimate the effort a job entails, be it teaching, sales, programming, graphic design, machining, car repair vet medicine, etc.
Most of my career history, when I've heard someone say "ugh, department X just sits around all day and occasionally does Y", they're assuming that the sliver of their insight into department X is the totality of what is actually done.
The depth of knowledge required to do it well warrants full university degrees in the topic. As with most things, you can probably take the autodidact route but be prepared to make a lot of mistakes. Also be prepared for those mistakes to cost 5 or 6 figures. The ease and almost zero cost of exploration and learning from failure that software allows does not always map to other domains. This is one of them.
Source: partner is an industrial designer and geeks out on plastics, materials science and manufacturing techniques way harder than obsessions I pursue. It’s literally her entire world and she still fucks up occasionally too.
Which is, honestly, kind of a reasonable assumption. In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor? Because all such people are too busy running their own successful product businesses?
It is very easy to convince yourself that you understand something because you read a lot about it, and what you read makes intuitive sense. But that is not at all the same as actually going out and doing the thing, and solving the problem from the blue sky. Dunning-Kruger sort-of describes this, but I believe that there's a multi-dimensionality issue where being on the good side of Mt. Stupid in one domain makes you overrate your capabilities in other domains. Vis the nuclear physicist disputing the official explanation of how the buildings collapsed on 9/11, apparently because he hadn't gotten to the part of the freshman material science course that covered how yield strength decreases with temperature.
So articles like this are important, even as they are kind of obvious to people who have already learned these lessons, because often times it takes learning these things the hard way to understand why (for instance) the software is actually the easy part of an IoT thingy.
How many hw startups start with "we'll just ship an Arduino/RPi with our custom module and that's it" heh, that's very not ideal for a variety of reasons
Highly recommend it because they give a lot of details and if you start from the beginning you can really see how they learned how difficult it was in going into the space. The multiple visits, quality control, the issues with who owns what, and where they lost money.
https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news?page=19
But those are the entertaining ones innit. What fun is it to read a blog (like OP) that says 'yeah we hired a bunch of experienced professionals and we didn't have any problems'. No, we want to read stories of 'so I forgot about one detail and the manufacturer completely misunderstood us so I had to fly to China and spend 100k to get it fixed and it still was 3 months late'.
And employing all those people doesn't guarantee success, but it does guarantee your failures will cost a lot.
You'd probably want to only attempt making something like this as a vanity project, where it matters less if you fail, and thereby half the fun is navigating the path to success by yoursel[f/ves].
But, just for completeness sake, the list of people who got blindsided by the con artist who was ultimately behind a lot of the crazy included both our experienced local on-the-ground project manager and the factory owner.
He had to cut milling bits with custom profiles to cut custom tools such as a series of graphite and copper spark eroder forms to cut just some of the corners and shapes in the (paper) technical drawings, then repeat for the next ill-advised bevel or interior sharp angle or even lettering which is too close together to get a milling bit inbetween two letters. Figuring that out was his responsibility alone. Instead of computer control, he'd have to do something like first create a scale model of part of the tool out of a block of plastic, then use a pantograph (a mechanical linkage allowing you to trace a shape with a pen and have the movement magnified/minified) to copy the shapes on a milling machine -- even shapes that seem simple. And then maybe throw away (actually, take home as a souvenir) a month or two's work if you cut slightly too deep -- these were high precision parts. Not because the plastic had to be so precise, but because the completed dies are made out of many steel parts that have to fit tightly together and slide past each other, as you can see in the article.
Considering the ~two months quoted in the article for this mold, I'd think a lot of that complexity is still essential despite modern computerized machining. I'm sure a great deal of ingenuity and many steps are still needed.
I've come to find plastics really quite interesting. It's kind of a magic material.
And at the same time it's a sort of like King Midas in which humanity gets this incredible material but now there's plastic everywhere polluting everything. Everything we touch is turning to plastic.
Yes, silk parachutes exist. But there was a reason why nylon was revolutionary - it was orders of magnitude cheaper and required a lot less care.
> Not to mention its unrepeatable and tends to get brittle with age. Meanwhile you can have a metal can opener thats 80 years old and works as good as new.
Plenty of metal can openers that are rusted, bent out of shape, or corroded enough to be unusable.
Plastic only usually gets brittle if it is left in sunlight (and not always then). Not sure what "unrepeatable" means in this context, but plastic is usually at least as repairable as wood or metal by using resin. Indeed, both wood and metal is often repaired by using resin based fillers.
While metals are known for their strength and temperature resistance, they are also prone to corrosion.
There are plenty of decades-old plastic parts in continued service everywhere, that you just aren't aware of because they haven't alerted you to their presence by failing.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plastic_(LDPE)_bowl,_by_G...
Beyond this, metal too has serious resource and energy implications. Think mining, smelting, production of the final shape, treatment against rust, paint, transport, etc. There are many steps, many inputs (notably chemicals and energy), and quite some demanding work going into it.
I have no answer to these questions: is it more or less resource efficient to produce 20 plastic can openers or 1 metal can opener? Is it more/less environmentally harmful? Is it more/less socially harmful?
A large number of modern medical treatments would be nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive without plastics, mostly for sterile use reasons. These use cases have saved countless lives. I'm not sure how you'd even begin tallying a count.
That also translates to customer cost
I equally dislike all the plastic junk that is bought for a couple bucks that are basically use for a moment and become trash. There are also amazingly wonderful things made out of plastic that last a long time when taken care of. Heck I still have toys from 30 years ago that were made out of plastic that are still in pretty good darn shape because they do not hit the sun. My rice cooker has a plastic shell and has lasted a long time. Same with my difference keyboards.
Be aware of your consumption but don't let it drag you down.
Agree mostly unless it's for something that needs to deal with water in some way.
I’ve been a big fan most of my life and it was / is my favorite toy product by far, but only as I got older, I realized how the whole system is not just brilliantly designed, but the mechanical _execution_ of the parts is at least just as impressive.
…And that it wouldn’t be possible without plastics. No other type of material could ever achieve such durability, flexibility and precision; and that’s not even considering costs – no other materials _period_.
LEGO is a perfect example of a product designed AROUND plastics – not something turned to plastics to lower costs.
Mokulock may not be identical or cost the same, but it's basically the same product without plastic. They don't snap together or come apart as easily, but I like the idea of it. I'd love to see LEGO done in metal too.
I wonder if you could do it with horn. I'm not sure how you'd make the hollow bits of blocks. But it has the right sort of properties. Relatedly, see:
https://plastiquarian.com/?page_id=14337
This is known as "draft":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_(engineering)
I'm more familiar with metal casting, but plastic injection molding seems to have a lot of similarities, such as shrinkage and flow considerations.
Recounted in an article in Fast Company:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3056684/remembering-the-design-l...:[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204217
Just because the mold was really expensive doesn't mean that the marginal cost of each unit created by it is more than a unit produced by a cheap mold. In many cases, the marginal cost is significantly less as you are able to use less raw material thanks to variable thicknesses, etc. There's a break-even point where the expensive mold becomes cheaper/better and that's another area where experienced manufacturing consultants help out.
The reason is that you want the tool to release the piece and not get bound up. Shape and cooling also factor in, but for simple box type shapes with no large cutouts, this is usually predictable.
Deleted Comment
Here's a story [1] of a company that found that the Taiwanese plastic company that made its custom parts stopped responding after 15 years. They got another one of their Taiwanese suppliers to go to the plastic company to see what was going on--and found that the factory was now a hotel and the sales office was a now a strip mall.
[1] https://www.stlpr.org/arts/2013-07-24/on-chess-the-case-of-t...
Also if we’re talking about China and not Taiwan, even if you do have people on the ground, how likely are you to win any kind of contract dispute?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMjtmsr3CqA
Interesting history of a process that's everywhere and invisible at the same time.