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Design for assembly

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Industrial Assembly

Abstract

In the ‘old days’ assembly methods were selected by engineers only after the product design had been completed, approved and authorized. As long as all the assembly work was manual, human assemblers could be expected to learn how to assemble even complicated products. There were some guidelines on how to plan the assembly method for effective manual assembly. When parts had to be designed for the non-forgiving automatic assembly machines, and later for robotic assembly (whose cost increases exponentially the more forgiving it is expected to be), designers realized the need to ‘design ahead’.

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© 1997 Shimon Y. Nof, Wilbert E. Wilhelm and Hans-Jürgen Warnecke

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Nof, S.Y., Wilhelm, W.E., Warnecke, HJ. (1997). Design for assembly. In: Industrial Assembly. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6393-8_3

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