#inktober #engineering Day 1 – Introduction

#inktober is a 31 day challenge created by cartoonist Jake Parker to encourage artists to develop both their drawing skills and positive drawing habits by doing one ink drawing per day for the entire month. I’m bringing inktober to engineering to encourage development of the overlooked but powerful ability of freehand drawing for engineering.

To explore the tools and techniques for freehand drawing in engineering, we’ll develop a hypothetical metal additive manufacturing system.

The primary medium of choice is the white board. But we’ll also delve into the proverbial backs of envelopes, engineering notebooks, and maybe even digital inking.

Day 1 – Introduction

In this first video, I introduce #inktober #engineering and a little about my discipline, precision engineering, including the related sub-disciplines of precision machine design and optomechanical engineering.
Then I introduce a hypothetical design project that follow through on for the month. Let’s see how far we get.

0:20 Welcome to the inktober engineering challenge
2:09 What is precision engineering
5:37 Listen, ask, learn, confirm
7:06 Defining success for a precision machine… and the project
10:19 let’s define a metal additive manufacturing machine
12:03 Designing from the “product” out
14:44 Describing the process around the product

Follow along the rest of the way

This post is part of the 31-day inktober engineering challenge. See all of the posts in the challenge here.

Related Articles

To learn more about how we define the art and science of precision engineering at Practical Precision – and how such an understanding can inform your designs – check out What Is Precision Engineering?

For more on the importance of understanding the underlying needs of your customers – whether your customer is the marketing department, a client, or the end user – check out Stiffness and Strength: Materials for Precision Machine Design and learn when strength doesn’t mean strength.