Product Design for Manufacture & Assembly Revised & Expanded [Hardcover]

Geoffrey Boothroyd (Author), Peter Dewhurst (Author), Winston A. Knight (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082470584X | ISBN-13: 978-0824705848 | Publication Date: September 15, 2001 | Edition: 2nd

Containing more than 300 equations and the extensive data necessary to estimate manufacturing and assembly cost during product design, benchmarking, and "should cost" analysis, this textbook gives students modern and effective tools for analyzing injection molding, sheet metalworking, die casting, powder metal processing costs, sand and investment casting, and hot forging. It includes discussions of the influence of the application of design for manufacture and assembly, material selection and economic ranking of processes, the effect of reduced assembly difficulties on product quality, the links between computer-aided design solid models and design analysis tools, and more.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: CRC Press; 2nd edition (September 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082470584X
• ISBN-13: 978-0824705848
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #876,128 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good methodology on how to re-engineer a product, January 12, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Boise, Idaho, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly (Hardcover)

Boothroyd and Dewhurst are recognized as international experts on the re-engineering of electro-mechanical products. Their methodology and guidelines have been widely documented to make significant savings. I have used their techniques with dozens of products in many companies in North America with vast improvement. I have also taught these techniques to many, many engineers who have had the same success.

The book is a good, comprehensive overview of designing products to ease thier assembly and manufacture. Other texts are available but most are not written as clearly.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I Read this book Cover to Cover, May 7, 2006

By 

Matthew Hill (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Product Design for Manufacture & Assembly Revised & Expanded (Hardcover)

Overview
Boothroyd and Dewhurst's Second Edition of Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly provides an accessible and reasonably thorough introductory treatment of some of the most common topics in the field of design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA). By introducing the theoretical underpinnings of DFMA in the opening chapter of the book, the authors provide context and support for the importance of the field in modern business, and draw attention to the many ancillary benefits of applying DFMA methodologies in a business environment. Subsequent chapters describe these methodologies, as well as major assembly and manufacturing processes in some detail. The authors also provide basic tools for cost analysis within the context of DFMA. On a whole, the book is a worthwhile read for novices or users of the authors' commercial software, but the content suffers at times in its dependence on that same software, and in its failure to explain or note omissions which were made in the favor of brevity.

Materials and Process Selection
The second chapter begins to elaborate in depth on some of the concepts developed in the first chapter by discussing the driving considerations in concurrent materials and fabrication process selection. While the chapter is useful in that it provides tabular references which document the compatibility of different engineering materials and processes, the chapter as a whole suffers from its methodological reliance upon the extensive databases included in commercial software which the authors market. Users of the software may find their exposition of its underlying algorithms useful, but those seeking an independent understanding of material and process selection may wish to consult other methodologies or references such as Ashby's Materials Selection in Mechanical Design, which are more user friendly, and are readily adaptable to manual application.

Design for Assembly
The third and fifth chapters of the book segue into the topic of assembly-both automatic and manual. Their treatment of assembly benefits from greater accessibility and independence from their software's methods, and the support of experimental results demonstrating the relationships which they discuss between part geometries and assembly. The general design guidelines are useful, and the empirically-derived equations are sufficient to allow the reader to perform basic analyses.

Where the third and fifth chapters focus upon the assembly of mechanical components, fourth and sixth chapters of the book focus instead upon the challenges of designing and assembling electrical boards and wiring in a product. Though modest guidelines are suggested, the material in these chapters is primarily limited to the mechanical aspects of electrical component assembly, and focuses particularly on techniques for estimating the assembly time and cost of these components. The goal of their inclusion here seems to be not as an aid for the electrical engineer, but rather as a reference and tool for the mechanical engineer charged with interfacing between the mechanical and electrical systems of a product.

Process-Specific Topics
From the seventh chapter through the fourteenth chapters, Boothroyd and Dewhurst choose to focus each chapter upon providing a thorough introduction to a particular, widely-used fabrication process. These chapters begin with an in-depth introduction to the mechanics of each process, the associated terminology, and its strengths and limitations for production applications. The materials commonly used in conjunction with each process are also covered in each section, but only superficially. The remainder of each chapter focuses upon providing basic, equation-based cost estimation techniques for each process which enable the designer to perform his or her own semi-detailed analysis of the costs associated with a particular component design. In the process of providing these tools, the authors take time to highlight particularly important and relevant relationships and design techniques which the majority of readers will find helpful.

By adhering to this general format, the process-focused chapters are in many ways the most useful in the book. For the student and educational audience seeking to develop knowledge in design for manufacturing, these chapters provide a comprehensive and accessible introduction to each process. For the practicing engineer or other individual seeking to perform cost analysis, the authors' exposition of the basic algorithm and process used to estimate cost for each process is invaluable. In particular, users of the authors' software package should derive the greatest benefit from these chapters as the equations they contain represent generalized and simplified versions of those underlying the software package. Therefore, mastery of these equations will provide valuable understanding of the software's operation, and make explicit the relationships between design decisions and specific part features and the final estimated part cost.

CAD/CAM
In the fifteenth chapter, which appears in many ways as a crudely grafted addition to the volume, though it was also present in the first edition, the authors provide an interesting overview of Computer Aided Design (CAD) technologies and the underlying logic and geometric representations utilized by CAD software packages. Their discussion of the implications of each technology for the potential integration of CAD and DFMA processes through automatic extraction of desired geometric data is also interesting, but the section as a whole suffers from having been overshadowed by the rapid improvements in CAD software which have been made in the ensuing 5 years since publication.

Summary
Boothroyd and Dewhurst's newest edition of Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly serves as a useful student introduction to the basic concepts of DFMA and shows particular strength as a textbook in its introduction to the field as a whole, and in particular to its well-balanced coverage of the eight common manufacturing processes which are described in its latter chapters. The authors' decision to omit certain other common processes, including welding and brazing, and several specialized plastic molding fields including rotational and blow molding is lamentable, but is understood within the text's limited scope as an introduction to the subject. The one more substantive challenge that might be leveled against the book concerns the authors' omission of adequate detail concerning geometric characterization and classification techniques, and their omission of more advanced or complex case studies which might help to clarify their intent here. This omission is a significant barrier to the application of the book's estimation techniques to real-world problems. At some level, it is possible that this decision may have been intentional, as this detail-like others-is presumably encompassed in the more complex algorithms and procedures used in the authors' software. At times, in fact, the book seems to suffer overly much from its companion status to the authors' software package, which the authors rely upon to fill in conceptual gaps in their writing.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, September 12, 2005

By 

Antarikso A. Rahman "practical" (Jakarta, Indonesia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Product Design for Manufacture & Assembly Revised & Expanded (Hardcover)

As an academician this book is easy to read but practitioners will have no diffculty in understanding the content of this book. I rate this book as a great book because of its practicality and yet it is theoretically sound.