Materials Selection in Product Design

Here's a glimpse on how we chose the material to make a gear for one of our kits.

So what are some of the attributes to consider when choosing a material?

There's many, for example: 

• Functionality

• Reliability

• Ease of prototyping

• Sourcing (where you get it from)

• Cost

We started evaluating a number of different materials - we had to choose fast because we were behind schedule!

We looked at a number of different materials such as acrylic, MDF (medium density fiberboard), metal, wood, etc. We eliminated MDF and metal because of cost reasons. Then we produced prototype gears with cardboard and wood - the wooden gear turned out to be great!

This is just a short example of our materials selection processes - make sure to look out for more posts in this series!