Lo, my 100 subscribers, who are you?

So I recently checked my subscription statistics to find that over a hundred of you have subscribed to pdnotebook.

First, thanks.

Second, why do you subscribe? What content do you find valuable? What content do you find utterly worthless? Do you follow via email, RSS, twitter, maybe even Quora?

I don’t have a master plan for this site; I just write about whatever I feel like. Sometimes that’s tolerance analysis (very popular from a page view standpoint), and sometimes it’s a tenuous connection between product development and a book I read (see: zen and the art of product development).

Still, even in the absence of a master plan, I’d love to know what you find valuable, and especially if there are any topics you would love to see covered.

Let me know in the comments.

And thanks again.

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Article by chris loughnane

Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 134 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.

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  • GMartin

    Hi Chris,    I subscribe via RSS. Not sure how or when I came across your blog, but I am glad that I did. You are dealing with the same things that I am – struggles with ProE, patent law, mechanism design, tolerance analysis, etc….   Reading your post is kind of like chatting with the engineer next door. BTW, how is studying for the patent bar exam going? 

  • https://plus.google.com/u/0/104384483856167052963/posts Sean McDonnell

    asfs

  • https://plus.google.com/u/0/104384483856167052963/posts Sean McDonnell

    Mechanical Engineer / Product Developer / Entrepreneur here.  26 years old. Currently working at a small firm in CT and I have 2-3 years of experience in the product development industry.
    When I recently discovered your site I was overjoyed and subscribed via RSS immediately. I’ve been wondering for a long time why there isn’t a site for people like us.  I suppose product design/development is a relatively specialized industry…but still, where is the “hackernews” for people that design and engineer physical products?!?  So far, your site is the closest thing I’ve found, and I love it.
    I think all of your posts are relevant and helpful and interesting. But since you asked, the one thing I wish we had more of (and your site might not even necessarily be the place for it) is a place to go for feature design inspiration.  Kind of like the “mechanism” resources you’ve posted – but for ”features” that can be designed into our parts.  In other words; you know how sometimes you see something in a product and think “Wow, I could use that!” (in a future product that your don’t even know you’re going to design yet).  A place to share things like that, or see things like that that others have discovered, would be awesome!
    (One way to discover these kinds of things might be to do teardowns of products that probably have cool features.  Even simple things like a pen, or a water bottle, or a perfect pushup bar…  Basically a “how it works” with a focus on what features the mechanical engineers designed into the parts to make it work well)  Just a thought :)

  • Drew Batchelor

    I’m 1% of your subscribers, RSS – Drew Batchelor, Senior Lecturer, Product Design and Mechanical Engineering, Bristol, UK. You’re content is original, interesting, intelligent, useful and Real. It reminds me of when I used to be self-employed, and designing at the coal face. Thank you. Drew

  • ausinine

    Hi Chris,

    Like a couple of the others, I subscribe via RSS, but I don’t remember how I came across your website.

    I’m an electronic/software engineer. It’s a totally different ballgame between putting together a cool prototype and coming out with a polished product. I find pretty much all your articles are useful, but the articles I originally subscribed for are the ones that deal with the mechanical engineering side of product development (injection molding, castings etc), just because that’s the stuff I don’t deal with as much.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    I’m glad you think so. Most of my posts are often born of conversations at work, so it’s nice to keep the dialog going.

    Studying for the patent exam has been a long tail effort, but i’m really in a groove at this point. It was tough in the beginning because I had to get used to reading sentences like like “this patent reads on this”, and “patent X is obvious in sight of patent Y”. Now I’m feel comfortable dissecting a patent and (more importantly) coming up with concepts that get around a patent (finding whitespace, in other words). I’m regularly scoring 80-90% on practice exams, so I’ll probably register to take it soon.

    I haven’t been posting as much on it (or anything else for that matter) because I’m so busy and would rather take a free hour to study instead of using half for studying and half for throwing together a post. I suspect once I’ve passed the exam I’ll have occasion to go back and revisit some of the more interesting nuances of what I’ve learned and how it’s applied.

    Also, I consider doing more pro|e posts (especially tricks for splines or mechanism evaluation), but I wonder if they are a little too esoteric. Maybe I should do some SolidWorks stuff.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    I’m familiar with your firm. I had some short correspondence with Jim S back in ’07. Looks like a cool place.

    I think the same thing. One of the things they say about blogging is that it helps to connect with people in your niche… but I can barely find any other people that run similar sites. The ones that I do find are either poorly maintained (a guy by the name of vince hileman (http://www.hilemansblog.com/) had some great stuff and I interacted with him for a bit, but he hasn’t posted in over a year) or they post too much just for the sake of posting and clog up my RSS reader (solidsmack).

    Oh well

    I like your post idea. Someone said that engineering is 99% reuse and 1% invention, so it would make sense to point out the things that work really well. I’ve got a bunch, it’s just a matter of finding the time to write them down.

    Actually I have time now, so I’ll give you one cool one.

    If you want to permanently attach two plastic pieces together, you can create a press fit by having one side have a hexagonal cut (lets say about 0.125″ side to side) and the other side will have a bullet-nosed pin (about 0.003″ interference per side, so a diameter of ~0.131). If you press these together it will snap into place and hold tight… you would probably break plastic before pulling it out.

    A caveat. This tends to work better with more rigid plastics like PC, ABS, PPS, etc (Essentially the things you would make housings out of) instead of things like PP or PE.

    There are obviously a lot of other considerations to take into account (environment, failure mode, presence of adhesives, etc.), but it’s a trick that has worked well, so there it is.

    Lastly, if you find a feature that you think is cool (or anything else you find compelling) and want to write a quick blurb about it, I have no qualms about throwing a guest post up here.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    Thanks Drew.

    Do you lecture on both product design and mechanical engineering? I wish the school I went to had integrated the two better.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    I’ll have to start tossing up some more hardcore engineering articles then.

    I hope there are more like you, so many integration issues are a function of mechanical folks not understanding electrical and vice versa. The more we are conversant with the other the smoother everything will run

  • Alex thomsen

    Hi Chris, 

    I came across your site looking for some tolerance analysis, which was very helpful. I noticed you have some other interesting posts, and you keep it up to date… so I put it on my RSS feed. Sometimes its better to opt for organic growth rather than planning it, keep it up.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    You like many. My series on tolerance analysis was (and is) some of my most popular content.

    Thanks for the support