How to Create Technical Drawings of Your Product Idea
When it’s time to get your physical product prototyped or manufactured a hand sketch of your idea won’t take you too far.
I am optimistic about technology, someday, giving us the power to imagine things and directly build an exact physical replica of what we have in our minds.
Unfortunately, we are not quite there yet, and to go from idea to a physical product we need to first “translate” what we have in our mind into a format that other humans and machines can interpret and use to build a product.
For most creative processes, machines still need humans to instruct them what to do.
This is what designers and engineers do, they evaluate your idea and your requirements and produce the formats that will allow anyone to visualize the idea and then help machines build the final product.
We call them the product Technical Drawings. I will go through the most common formats that are generated to help define your physical product idea based on which stage the product is or the level of detail needed.
Design Sketches
One of the most basic and relatively simple formats to start with are design sketches. But these are not simply rough hand-drawings made on a piece of paper.
In order for design sketches to be useful in the development and fabrication process, they must have a certain level of accuracy and information included on them.
These design sketches are commonly produced by an Industrial Designer and they often create them by hand although nowadays most use computer software.
This is the first level of detail about your idea and it should include the following main elements:
- Visual aesthetics that show the main design intent and give a clear understanding of the product look.
- Materials & Finishes of the product and different components.
- General dimensions of the product to have a reference (with low accuracy) when fabricating a mock-up or prototype.
- Description of the main functionalities that help to understand how parts are fixed together, how they move or how they are supposed to function.
With this information, a professional (or even yourself if you have certain skills) can fabricate mock-ups of the product and explore different designs and material alternatives.
2D Drawings
In the past, 2D drawings or blueprints were common in any product development and they were literally laying around any office or workshop. Today they are mostly used in their digital format but they are still commonly used.
The two-dimensional world is not dead yet.
Depending on which product you are developing 2D drawings are the main technical drawings used. That’s the case with most soft-goods for example, where parts and layers of the product can be produced from 2D patterns.
Despite the rise of 3D modeling which has made these “flat” versions less relevant, they are still widely used as support documentation since they provide certain information that is critical in the development.
These technical 2D drawings are mainly created by Mechanical Engineers and are highly accurate and precise. This is what you would expect to see in a 2D drawing:
- Product views. Different types of views such as front, rear, side, top, bottom, sections, and isometric views are defined to have access to every single area of the product.
- Materials. The exact material and grade (this is the commercial name from material manufacturers) are specified. Also, the color and any additional finish or post-process such as protective coating or paint are included in the drawing.
- Detailed dimensions. Most of the dimensions of the product and features are defined in the drawing as a reference.
- Critical dimensions. There are certain dimensions that are important for the design since they may affect the fit between components, mechanical movements or function of your product.
- Tolerances. All dimensions should have a range of tolerances, especially those defined as critical above. The manufacturing process usually drives the tolerance range achievable, but the geometry of the product affects as well.
Sometimes 2D drawings are used as a full product specification and may include other relevant information to help define assembly or inspection instructions among other useful data.
CAD Models
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are probably the most commonly used type of format nowadays and the one that is usually required to be able to fabricate the product and its components using machines.
CAD software allows designing the 3D digital representations of a product
In fact, the 2D Drawings described above are usually created after the 3D models. CAD software can quickly create those 2D digital versions from the 3D model and create a link between them so when you modify the 3D it will automatically update the 2D drawing.
These, again, are mostly created by Mechanical Engineers and will define volumes for the product and components. This is the main information that you can get from CAD models:
- 3D view. Using a CAD software (or any available viewer) you can visualize the product in every orientation and in real-time. From 3D models, you can also get Renders which are photorealistic visualizations of your 3D model.
- Dimensions. While dimensions are not explicitly indicated in the model, you are able to measure any dimension that you want in the model with exact precision.
- Assembly. Most products are made of different parts, so CAD models let you visualize where components are located and how they fit with each other.
- Simulations. A very useful and powerful aspect of CAD models is the possibility to perform virtual simulations. You can check the performance of a component when loads are applied, the effects of temperature or check the dynamics of fluids and gases among many others.
CAD models are the main technical files used to fabricate prototypes and mass production. With these files, manufacturers can 3D print, design their own tools (also in CAD) and perform analysis to confirm that the product is ready for manufacturing.
Electronics Schematics
This is only relevant if your product has electronic boards on it, commonly known as Printed Circuit Boards Assembly (PCBA). In terms of dimensions and materials, as seen earlier, a 2D drawing of the boards will be used as well.
However, there are specific electronic files that will be produced to illustrate with a diagram the logic of how the electronic components interact with each other to achieve a particular function.
These files are created by an Electronic Engineer and they represent a less visual aspect of the product and instead explain how the product should function. An electronics schematics include the following elements:
- Components. The diagram uses symbols to represent the different electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, switches, transistors or Integrated Circuits among others.
- Connections. The schematics diagram indicates how components are wired together in a circuit by the means of lines and nodes.
- Voltage. It assigns each component to a specific voltage level.
This information will later help to build the physical board by knowing how each component will connect to each other. Also, it will help to define the actual location for each component on the board based on the diagram’s logic and taking into account each component’s size and other specific rules and regulations that need to be met.
What’s Next
Once you have a set of technical drawings for your product, you will be able to send it to a fabrication space or a manufacturer. However, there are certain aspects of the design that should be considered in order for it to be ready for manufacturing.
It requires a technical review of the design and an understanding of the fabrication process to ensure that the design is ready for production, which is commonly known as Design for Manufacturing (DFM).
Additionally, you would want to track the list of components that are part of your product and the costs associated with each one of them, including any tooling and equipment costs and costs of assembly. A Bill Of Materials (BOM) is used to track this data of your product.
With all of the above information about your product, you should have a well-documented product with a properly defined level of quality that you can take to any manufacturer with confidence.
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Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.
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