Planning Your Project

Overview

Planning is an essential component of any fabrication process.  Poor planning leads to poorly designed and low quality components being rushed through production and delivered late. Fortunately, planning well is not a difficult skill to learn.
 

Tips

People who are not familiar with fabricating components in a shop setting often underestimate the time it will take to complete a project. A good tip to remember is this: estimate how long it will take to complete the fabrication part of your project, and then double it.  This is especially true with machining, which requires time for proper set up before users can actually begin machining.  Students should plan to spend at least an hour each time they come into the shop; trying to accomplish a task in less time than that is usually not feasible.

Consider the following when planning a project that you need the machine shop for:

1. Make sure you have met the requirements needed to use the machine shop
2. Design your part to minimize fabricating steps
3. Create a complete set of detailed, dimensioned prints
4. Students should review their designs with the machine shop staff prior to ordering materials or starting a project
5. Make a list of all operations needed to fabricate the part
6. Organize the list of operations in the most logical order (don't forget that some steps necessarily precede others)
7. Make a list of all of the tooling and measuring devices needed for each operation
8. Figure out how to hold the work piece for machining during each operation
9. Reserve the proper machine ahead of time
10. If the part is complex consider machining the part in discrete steps over several days.