A Day In The Life-I

This is the first post in what will be a continuing series of posts about working as a tooling engineer in industry. It may be boring to some, or it may be highly entertaining to others. I guess it depends on your point of view. Personally, it is boring already-just kidding.

Tooling is a highly unique and grossly underrated necessity of manufacturing any product. Most of those at the top of an organization have not a clue about tooling and are caught unawares when the bill becomes due. Then it is “whoa-why does this cost so much?” Usually, that happens-every fricking project-these guys never learn. It is also always never their fault-even when it is on the estimate.

Another thing I have seen many times is management grossly having the tooling under estimated on the quote so that they can get the work. That is fine if you want to make the investment-eat some of the tooling costs to get the work in the door. It is not okay when you then conveniently forget that was the plan; then start bitching about how much the tooling costs, how long the tooling is taking, why was this not accounted for, and just basically looking for an escape goat. I hate that-bad planning and blaming others is bad leadership skills.

For any product or project-I would say that after the costs of poor design-which is the costs of quality-tooling costs have to be the highest initial costs there are. Especially, in the plastic and stamping/forming worlds-that tooling is complex. Those are some of the most challenging and precision tooling that I have ever seen-and a complete science in itself. That stuff is not cheap-even when they farm it out to China. It is just not possible to get around that as far as I know.

I remember looking for a plastic mold for a simple part and after talking with the mold tooling guy-he said even a simple mold could easily cost $100,000-and that was like fifteen years ago. That is pretty big money for a simple part.

I love it though-I love tooling with a passion-it is very challenging-but rewarding work. It is right where engineering and manufacturing meet at the cross-roads of modern industrial life. Do a Google search for just assembly tooling and look at some of the images that come up-especially in the aircraft industry-that stuff is incredible. You can start to see how the costs and knowledge skills quickly add up-and in some cases you can see that people might get hurt or killed if everything is not thought of ahead of time.

Well-I hope you have enjoyed this first post-you can tell that I am an incredible writer and full of wisdom and knowledge and charisma… or full of something.

Until next time.

-Ron

Ron Dietz is the Editor-in-Chief  for Tooling Magazine.
He has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Engineering.
He has 18 years experience in metal manufacturing as a welder, machinist, tooling engineer, and machine designer.
His main interests are CNC machine designs, automated machinery, and complex tooling.

FAIR USE NOTICE. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of economic, scientific, and engineering issues, etc.. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.