Bulletin: ELCAN Designs With Manufacturing In Mind

By Andy Shaw

This is the first in a four-part series on "design for manufacturing and assembly" or DFMA for short — an innovative way to bring prototypes, or even cocktail-napkin concepts, into profitable production.

If ever anyone clearly understood what good design combined with new technology might accomplish, it was Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps known best for his paintings of Madonna and the Last Supper, da Vinci was more prolific as a mechanical engineer and builder as he was an artist. In the early stirrings of the Renaissance Age of arts and sciences for example, da Vinci conceived the potential of the optical telescope. He wrote (in his reversed handwriting) about bringing: "…the image of a single planet onto the base of a concave mirror. The image of the planet reflected by the base will show the surface of the planet much magnified." It would still be nearly a century before great inventors such as Lippershey, Galileo and Newton would develop telescope designs that employed this optical breakthrough.