Some Eclipse Photos

The eclipse yesterday was jaw-dropping. We enjoyed it with friends and I got a bunch of photos, which I’m pretty darn happy with…

ANGLE is moving…

ANGLE is moving to the foothills of the Berkshires. The (home) office will be overlooking the forested landscape of Westhampton, MA. Check out the contact page for more information.

Parallels

A few years ago, I started to get into photography. As a hobby, it seems perfect for me. On the one hand, the gear and specs and technical aspects speak to my engineering brain. On the other hand, the way you have to look at the world and compose your images really let me explore my artistic side.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my photographic journey, so far, has paralleled the beginning of my engineering career. I started with some innate intuition and creativity, but I needed to learn a bunch of new techniques and how to use a whole series of tools and equipment. I also needed to learn how to work methodically to apply these tools and techniques to what I was trying to achieve.

Fresh out of school, I learned how to work in CAD to create models representing my concepts. I learned some basic machining skills in the shop, which built an understanding of the possibilities and constraints of CNC processes. I examined a large number of injection molded parts, torn down from other products, to explore not only how the “rules of injection molding” apply, but also how those rules can be bent or broken to achieve more complex things.

Progress came fast at the beginning, making huge leaps in understanding and abilities. Over time, all of this knowledge built up, augmented by the experiences from all the projects I worked on, each of which included learning a handful of new tricks in my CAD software, a new manufacturing process, and new injection molding or mechanism challenges. Each project also included mistakes that needed to be identified and corrected.

It all adds up (after 26+ years) to my current skill set and level of expertise.

In my photography, I’m still at the beginning. And that is exciting, knowing that I have decades ahead of me, to improve my skills and expertise (and, yeah, my gear, too).

In 2022, this was my astrophotography skill level (I’m hoping Squarespace doesn’t crush all the details in these images):

In 2023, after a lot of practice and reading up on techniques, here’s where I’m at:

Fourteen Years

Fourteen years ago, amidst the worst of the Great Recession, I was laid off. After a dozen years split between two consulting firms, I wasn't sure what to do next. I knew that all the other local firms had already been paring back their staff and were not hiring. Where was I going to go?

After much deliberation, I realized I had this choice: try to find a position in the corporate world or try to find clients as an independent consultant. Both options were foreign to me, but I knew that I enjoyed and thrived in a consulting role, helping a broad range of clients on a variety of project types. So I took my first steps down that path, and fourteen years later I have never looked back.

It hasn't always been easy. After months of reaching out among the people I had collaborated with over the previous dozen years, I finally landed my first quick gig (thank you, Rich and Betsy). Shortly after that, I received a call from an old client which turned into two years collaborating on a large piece of medical capital equipment. ANGLE was off the ground.

With every subsequent project, I was continuing to build out my network. In its fourteen years, 100% of my work as ANGLE has come from within that network, whether I'm augmenting teams at product development firms or working directly for companies ranging from startups to large corporations. All projects started with someone I've worked with or for, or they precipitated from introductions from within the network. 

Earlier this year, I was reminded of the uncertainty of those initial days after being laid off. A client that represented about 90% of my workload made the difficult decision to halt their development projects. I was left with nothing to do but reach out among the now-much-larger network of friends and collaborators. This time it took only a matter of weeks to fill up my bandwidth (actually overfill it, but that's the other side of the cyclical nature of consulting).

All this to say that I am exceedingly fortunate and appreciative to have such an amazing and supportive network of friends and colleagues. I love what I do. And I just felt like I should say thank you to everyone who helps to make it all possible.

“Thank you!”

On reading more…

In my last post, I talked about reading Injection Mold Design Engineering by David O. Kazmer, as a way to improve my skills in designing injection molded parts. And the knowledge gained from that book has already helped while working with a Chinese manufacturer to troubleshoot a tricky problem we’re having with an overmolded part I have designed.

The drive to read more books started when I began teaching a course at Northeastern University three years ago, an elective offered through the College of Engineering and The Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship Education, titled Engineering Product Development Methodology. I thoroughly enjoy teaching this course, helping students understand how products are designed and make it to market. While planning my syllabus and improving my lecture content each semester, I began reading more books relevant to the various aspects we cover. This past semester, I decided to emphasize the benefits of user research, adding Research Methods for Product Design by Alex Milton & Paul Rogers to the book list.

In addition to the books I read for the course, I have really ramped up my reading in general: I have read fifty books in the first half of 2020. Most weren’t specifically for the course, but there were titles I read that I thought might be helpful to recommend to my students. Examples include Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Design is a Job by Mike Montiero, and Prototyping and Modelmaking for Product Designers by Bjarki Hallgrimsson.

This year, I also did a shallow dive into the basics of Arduino, reading Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh and Programming Arduino by Simon Monk. This will help me teach the course and could also have applications in my normal job.

Just the 30 from Apple’s Books app…

Some of the books I’ve read are long, like the textbook on mold design, or short, like Paul Rand’s 1947 Thoughts on Design. Some were to better inform myself on currently very relevant topics, like So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. Some were grim analogies to the pandemic, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Ling Ma’s Severance. Some were just for enjoyment, like Andrzej Sapkowski’s series for The Witcher, Ted Chaing’s latest collection of stories, Exhalation, and TV (The Book) by Alan Seppinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz.

Will I make it to one-hundred books read by the end of the year? I’m not sure, but I have found the written word to be a very soothing balm in the very stressful times we’re all living through right now. I’d recommend any and all of the books mentioned above, and if you have any books that you’ve enjoyed recently, I’d love to hear about them.

Becoming a better plastic part designer

Learning new things to enhance old skills…

I’ve been designing injection molded parts for over two decades. None of my college courses covered it, and I was never formally trained. Instead, I simply started designing parts with the help of awesome mentors, online design guides, and by acquiring knowledge though examining existing plastic parts.

The fundamental rules (uniform wall thickness, adding draft & radii, etc.) are relatively easy to grasp. Over time, I learned how to design more complicated parts, using techniques such as side-actions, bypass shutoffs, and lifters. I designed overmolded and insert-molded components. I also learned ways in which you could break the basic rules to create even more complex and feature-rich parts, reducing part counts and simplifying assembly.

Now, I consider plastic part design one of the primary areas of expertise I bring to ANGLE.

However, until recently, I still understood only the basics of mold design and how the press operated. It’s generally not covered in any depth in the materials you find about part design. You can definitely learn how to design parts, even with complicated features, without needing to really understand runner systems or ejector options or the challenges of cooling. You can get by without knowing the difference between a stripper plate and an ejection plate, or what a sprue-puller does.

In one of my recent projects, I was working closely with suppliers in China, including tooling reviews where they shared the CAD of the mold designs. Exploring those CAD models was both informative and a bit overwhelming. I was fortunate enough to be collaborating on this project with a retired engineer with deep tooling knowledge, who taught me a lot about those tools in particular, but I was still unclear about some things.

I realized that in order to become a better part designer, I should learn more about tool design. So I got a textbook and read it cover-to-cover (something I don’t think I’d ever even done while in college).

I chose “Injection Mold Design Engineering” by UMass Lowell professor David O. Kazmer. Reading it confirmed a lot of what I had gleaned over the years and corrected a few of my misconceptions.

At the basest level, it helped me get the nomenclature right, understanding the pieces and systems that make up most molds. But the explanations of layout design, feed systems, gating and venting designs, and cooling and ejections systems gave me insights into how tool design impacts part quality. And beyond tool design, the information about the stages of the molding cycle (plastication, filling, packing, cooling, and ejection) all have implications regarding the performance and appearance of final molded parts.

I wish the book went a little deeper into actions, shutoffs, and lifters (and other techniques for creating even more complicated features), but that just drives me to continue delving into this subject.

I have no intention of ever getting into actual tool design. But I always implore my students to continue building their skills and tool sets. For me, learning more about tool design will help me to design better parts and to be more knowledgeable when collaborating / negotiating with suppliers and mold-makers to ensure the highest quality parts for my clients.

Beginning a blog…

I’ve never tried my hand at writing for the general public. There have been times when I’ve had nascent ideas for posts, but never had a real forum to post them to. So they remained undeveloped, and most have been forgotten.

With this new website design, based on simple templates, it’s now easy for me to create blog posts. I hope to occasionally add content here — thoughts about the product development industry, reflections from the course I teach at Northeastern, things that are new (to me!), and sometimes (with client approval) announcements of product launches or news for projects ANGLE has participated in.

These posts won’t be regular, but I do hope to keep adding content here, as topics come to mind.