I'd like to say a few words about bringing a product to market for those readers who have little experience in manufacturing methods. When talking about a design, "robustness" of design is a VERY big consideration. In broad terms what this means is: will it work first time/every time under all stress and environmental conditions and can it be manufactured economically?
Let's talk about a single part. Most prototype parts of any complexity are machined from raw stock to exacting tolerances in a model shop by a companies best craftsmen. Now let's put that part in production. The product engineer sits down with a tool designer. How do we do it--OK a die casting. That wall is too thick--won't cool properly. That wall is too thin--metal won't flow. These radii are too sharp--stress concentrations. How many cavities in the die? How do we cool the die? Where are the ejection pins located? We can't wait all day for the part to cool but we can't kick it out while it's so hot it will distort. Can't hold those tolerances--Can you get by with +/- .002" after shrinkage? Very important--what's the material? After we finish machine the most critical surfaces, then heat treat and quench, will the part still be to spec.? How many tool designers can we free up to work on this project? How loaded up are our tooling vendors? What about inspection? What inspection tools do we need to design? Do we have the space and personnel to do it? Then comes first lot run and first lot inspection. Then comes (hopefully) the final tweak of the tooling and the first production run. This has to be repeated for every part.
Production ready---I never had sex with that woman---What does it mean?
All of the above and much more is known to any prospective buyer but there is no way we'll see any of this tech coming off an assembly line, in quantity, for several years. Hard tooling is a time consuming and very expensive process. Modern tech such as computer simulations will help but there is no way around getting hard tooled parts, assembling and testing the assy. before going into full production.
