Designing and building a multistation automated assembly system takes time. A simple project might take 12 to 14 weeks. A complex one could take three or four times that long.

Monitoring and meeting regulations is an ongoing challenge for every business, regardless of the products they make or the services they provide.

Ask a random group of people to explain Rotabroach annular cutting, and you’ll probably get silence. Pose the same question to workers at Lum, MI-based Lumco Manufacturing Co. and you’ll get an earful. The reason: They often make machines that use this technology to cut ferrous and nonferrous metals.

During the early decades of the 20th century, Skoda Auto was a Czech automobile manufacturer with a few small plants (in Mlada Boleslav, Kvasiny and Vrchlabi) and a strong desire to meet the mobility needs of its citizens. But, that all changed after World War II.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bolster U.S. manufacturing; slash the corporate tax rate; build a wall on our southern border to keep out illegal immigrants; and invest more than $1 trillion to upgrade the nation’s aging infrastructure.

Designing a new medical device is a bit more complicated than designing a toaster or an automotive cooling system. Besides the issues common to any product—feasibility, usability, and design for manufacture and assembly—there are also issues of biocompatibility, sterilization and FDA regulations to deal with.

Movies and TV shows consistently promote lead characters who are able to complete their mission with little or no help from others. In the world of fastening, self-tapping screws fit this role better than any fastener, as they have the ability to create mating threads in metallic and nonmetallic base materials.

New plastics and coatings are giving automotive engineers a wealth of options for interior design. These materials offer the promise of additional functionality beyond just decoration or passenger protection.

Taking a part that was assembled from several components and reducing it to one 3D-printed part has obvious benefits like weight reduction. But there are also other value propositions that start from the beginning of the design phase and reach towards end-use safety and reliability.

For decades, appliance designers have used plastic materials to solve engineering challenges in design capabilities, labor and material costs.