Techshot Boosts Engineering Productivity and Innovation

Electrical Engineer Uses SpaceClaim to Contribute Early to 3D Concept Design

Nathan Thomas is a product designer at Techshot, an engineering and product development company founded in 1988 and based in Greenville, Indiana. From product design to production, Techshot's 30-plus team of engineers, scientists, and technicians specializes in providing a multi-disciplinary approach to design challenges. They serve many government agencies, notably NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense; universities such as Indiana University and the Ohio State University; and a growing list of commercial customers including Procter & Gamble and ASAP Automation.

Like the experience of so many other product development firms, the benefits of 3D modeling had been limited to Techshot's mechanical designers who are dedicated CAD specialists. Thomas, who is an electrical engineer, had never used a 3D modeling system for his conceptual designs, which meant he relied on others to help formulate his ideas. This hampered his communication with the rest of Techshot's product development team—that was, until he started using SpaceClaim Professional 2007.

"We work in a multi-disciplinary environment, where we all need to do a little bit of everything," Thomas explains. "So although I'm an electrical engineer, I often need to do some mechanical design as well, particularly in the early stages of a design." Although their CAD operators use Autodesk® Inventor™, Thomas himself had no 3D CAD experience prior to using SpaceClaim. Instead, he gave hand sketches to a CAD operator who would interpret Thomas' design from the sketch and then use Inventor to turn that into a meaningful design package of drawings and parts lists.

Often a conceptual design will take several iterations, so it makes sense for the designer to have the ability to manipulate the model firsthand. But when Thomas needed to make changes to the design, he had to go to the CAD operator—making "on-the-fly" changes difficult, limiting design productivity, and hamstringing the innovation process.

Now Thomas is successfully using SpaceClaim to model his own designs. He recently used SpaceClaim to create a complex bracket to mount connectors inside a new proprietary device for a highly competitive industry. The bracket required both machining and bending to fabricate, so the modeling task was fairly complicated.

"I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use SpaceClaim," reports Thomas. "Its dynamic modeling capabilities make it simple to create and modify part geometry and its user interface is well-designed, making the software very intuitive. In fact, the amount of time it took me to model the part was less than the time it took me to actually measure the product it was going into!"

Once Thomas' concept design was complete, the model was transferred to Inventor for full detailing and then given to Techshot's fabricator as an IGES file. Because SpaceClaim has an open file format and the data exchange capabilities to support design sharing, Thomas was able to open the IGES file in SpaceClaim, to review the final fabrication model, and confirm that it matched his original concept. He can even use it as the basis for a new design if needed.

The conceptual design process requires flexibility in a 3D modeling tool—the flexibility to exercise the design model in all sorts of unanticipated ways and quickly explore multiple design alternatives. And as Techshot has discovered, SpaceClaim delivers that flexibility. "SpaceClaim saved us both time and money, eliminating the inefficiency of a manual conceptual design process and the redundancy of having our CAD operators recreate my design," concludes Thomas. "SpaceClaim exceeded my expectations. Now I can quickly and easily model my own designs. I don't have to be a CAD operator; instead I can be a designer."

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