Materials and manufacturing at home. As an overview in this section. First of all, we're going to go through the different ways to create parts for our designs, we're going to learn a simplified view of materials and the advantages of each of them. We'll go through manufacturing methods to build nearly any prototype. And lastly, we'll look at the design process, we're going to have to choose a material and choose a manufacturing method to build our parts. So there are thousands of different types of materials, but really, they can be vastly simplified for practical purposes, we want to be able to produce any part from home so we want to be open to, to being able to produce custom parts from really all types of materials.

We need to keep the manufacturing method in mind when we are designing. So we can't necessarily always just design any crazy part because every every part that we create is going to need to be made somehow and there's a limited number of manufacture training methods. And so we have a lot of options. But we're going to need to know the basics of manufacturing methods. But we really just need a simple picture in our mind of these manufacturing processes. We don't need to be experts at machining for a lot of the parts, we won't be making them ourselves, we're going to have a machine shop do it for us.

But we just need a simple picture. And we're going to be able to design a lot of custom parts, what are the different ways to get parts for design. So first of all, we can order a premade part that fits in our design, whether we order it online, or we go to a hardware store, we can order a part that has already been manufactured, we can modify your premade parts. So for example, buying a pipe from a store and cutting it to length modifying a bracket, say we buy a bracket from a hardware store, and we need it just say a half an inch shorter, we modify that bracket and use that in our design. And in general buying premade parts is going to be a huge way that we can Save money. Last of all, we are going to need to make a lot of custom parts we want to have this freedom available to us.

And so when we're making custom custom parts, we're buying stock material in a stock shape and we're shaping it as we need at home. So, this An example would be buying lumber from a lumber store and cutting the lumber and shaping it to what we need 3d printing or machining metal at home or we can hire someone to make the custom part from us from a stock material. So having a machine shop build the part for us. So now we look at the different types of materials we have metals, plastics, ceramics, examples would be dinnerware, so plates and bowls also ceramics are also used in bathroom tiles and bathroom fixtures. composites examples would be carbon fiber and fiberglass glass which would technically be a another ceramic Here we're talking about clear glass, such as used in Windows, we have rubber, wood and fabric. Now of these materials, it's a lot more common to buy some of these materials pre made, and those would be glass and rubber.

So with glass, if we need a transparent viewing window of some sort, there's a lot of different pre made glass viewing windows that we can buy. And then we can design our part around that with the category of rubber. A lot of the time rubber parts are molded. And so to be able to make a rubber part custom, we definitely could do it at home. But to be able to make a custom rubber part, a mold is needed. And to make a mold, it's typically it costs a lot of money commonly over $1,000 to make custom rubber parts and so it's not going to be as much of a go to method to make custom Parts and sulfur rubber parts a lot of the time we can buy them pre made, we might be able to slightly modify them and we can fit them into our parts.

With the category of wood wood is definitely a common material to, to use to build a prototype. The thing about it though, compared to metal, typically, you're not going to be able to make as accurate of a part with a metal you can, you will definitely be able to machine down to a thousandth of an inch, sometimes even down to 10 thousandths of an inch. Whereas that's not going to be as common with wood but we definitely want to keep wood open to us for building prototypes. And with fabrics. We want to be open to this as well because they're sometimes used in in building something but we're not going to get into that in detail in this course with with sewing but the four at the top, stick out as materials that people are not as comfortable with making custom parts. And we absolutely can, we can bring all four of these materials to our home, which means that we can bring this entire list to our home and we're going to learn methods to make custom parts from the top four materials.

So first of all, we have metals and there's a lot of different types of metals. At the top we have steel, which is plain carbon steel, stainless steel, aluminum titanium. The next three brass copper and bronze would be your goldish or yellow colored metals, they're typically known for being softer. So similar to aluminum, they are easier to machine and they're known to be better conductors of electricity and heat. So especially copper is a really good conductor of electricity. And it's commonly used in wires.

A lot of the times we're buying wires pre made though, and there's think tungsten, nickel, lead and 10. Now of these certain materials, definitely stick out To be the most some of the most commonly used and materials that will allow us to build almost any prototype and each of them have their own characteristics, but those are steel, stainless steel, aluminum and titanium. So with these far we should be able to build tons and tons of parts. So in choosing a metal, as I said, each of these four are going to have different strengths or different characteristics. So aluminum, first of all is going to be lightweight. It's corrosion resistant, which means that we could use it outside or in applications with water.

It's going to be medium strength, but it's quite inexpensive. We go to steel steel is high strength, but it lacks corrosion resistance, and it's heavy. Now stainless steel is known to be is built to be corrosion resistant. We can use this outside, it's common in applications that are outdoors. It's high strength. Again, it's heavy, and it's fairly expensive, more expensive than steel.

And lastly, we have titanium. So titanium is is high strength it has it's known to have a high strength to weight ratio, which means that it's very strong, but at the same time, it's light. It also has corrosion resistance. And so really, it's it has all of the properties that we might want, but it is but we pay for it, it's the most expensive. So these are for metals that can be our go to metals. As a very crude measure.

This won't always work, but it's a very crude measure, we could say the following if aluminum is strong enough for your application, we could go with it, if not, we would go with steel or stainless steel depending upon whether we would need to erosion resistance or not. And lastly, we would choose titanium if all of these characteristics all of these design constraints are needed, such as we would want low weight, high strength and corrosion resistance. So we move on to plastics plastic, They are unique. And they are typically chosen for durability. So strength with repeated use. They're lightweight, definitely more lightweight than metals.

They're low cost. Commonly, they're more, they're more inexpensive than metals. They're easy to manufacture in certain ways that we're going to talk about. They have low electrical and thermal conductivity. So low electrical conductivity that's going to be quite different than metals. And we can use them in chemical resistance applications as well.

And they can be made in a variety of colors. And so sometimes we are looking for certain colors in our designs as well. So with plastics, again, there's many different types of plastics, PLA and abs are going to be your most common for 3d printing. If we have a high temperature application, we could turn to a plastic like peak if we need some kind of a viewing window and we'd want it made out of plastic. We could go to acrylic it would be a good choice, but In general, this entire list of plastics here are going to have similar characteristics. And if for our design, we're not as fussy about exact characteristics that we might want, there are definitely some general rules we could choose a multi use plastics such as Delrin, and that's gonna be able to meet a lot of our purposes.

Doran is known to be one of the easier plastics to machine and it can be a go to plastic when we're looking for the characteristics that we just talked about previously. Moving on to ceramics ceramics are typically chosen for high temperature resistance, so they can hold up to very high temperatures, high wear resistance, so they're very commonly used in variants a wheel for example, where materials are going around and around and around in a repeated process. And you would need high high wear resistance that material is not going to wear down or or break into pieces, low electrical and thermal conductivity and ceramics are known to be Very hard they can sometimes be brittle but they're very hard materials custom ceramic parts can be machined similar to metal or plastic parts and applications would be in furnaces. So, where you have high temperature high power applications, again you would have high temperature there along with welding and bearings.

A go to ceramic would be micro is a good choice for a multipurpose ceramic that can be machined and can meet a lot of the different purposes if we need the characteristics of a ceramic. And lastly, we have composites. So, composites are known for being lightweight yet strong an example of their use would be an aircraft where we need strong materials yet since we're up in the air we need to be lightweight. They're also used in motorcycle bodies or bicycle bodies car bodies, where again we want high strength and lightweight, carbon fiber and fiberglass are very common. composites and again these can be machines similar to metal or plastic parts or we can make custom ceramic parts from fabric and resin at home.