How To Simplify Toy Manufacturing With CAD

Children’s toy design and manufacturing can have difficulty in achieving a safe, aesthetically pleasing, entertaining and complex product. 

While CAD is an integral part of the engineering process, how do you use CAD to solve specific problems in the child toy designs?

We will look at complex designs, material constraints, regulatory compliance issues, the iterative design process for products, and how to integrate function with aesthetic elements. 

Examples will be provided to show how to deal with specific issues.

It's So Complex That It Confused Everyone

A method to reduce unnecessary complexity is to make an assembly or subassembly per the real life assembly process. 

This practice organizes the design tree and mates to reflect the real life product

This practice results in a robust model and mate tree that free of confusion

A secondary outcome is walking through real life assembly steps before heavy cost in time and material.

As evolutions to the model occur, previous mates should not interfere or limit other mates. 

This is a common problem when certain features like a specific plane are used to set a distance rather than the two mating surfaces mated correctly.

In particular to toy manufacturing, mimicking mate selection that reflects a real assembly process helps to use any guides or alignment marks. 

Ignoring this practice can result in important reference marks or other geometry being missed.

These issues are often found when unexpected issue arise in the physical assembly process, but they can be avoided with CAD!

Some programs do provide tools to help with this, such as in Solidworks there is an interference detection tool.

But….

Using a consistent ideology such as the one mentioned will help reduce problems and corrections needed across any CAD software. 

Rules and Regulations

Two standards that toys companies must comply with include: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the European Union’s EN 71 standard.

While the regulations are subject to change and revision, they still have to be met. 

A key asset of CAD Software is the flexibility to visually show how different standards are met. 

This flexibility is powerful when small features need to be highlighted or the feature is internal to the design. 

This flexibility makes adapting to those different situations easy. 

Highlighting how the standards are met with visual imagery can be used not just at the end, but at every phase of the project. 

As questions and concerns inevitably surface doing the course of a project, take care of them on the spot. 

Whether using visual rendering tools to show an answer to a problem or the latest revision!

Evolution Is A Guarantee

Iterations and evolutions are part of every design. 

The CAD workspace starts blank and develops as parts and assemblies are created.

After creating all of the needed parts  and assemblies, how do you that it functions as intended?

Simulating the motion that the toy is designed to undergo is invaluable in evaluating if the design will function as intended.

The built in precision and analytical tools in 3D CAD software allows for a precise look at how parts interact in an assembly. 

That sounds nice, but how does it help me?

The information in the CAD model can be used to make the necessary adjustment.

A simple example of this is opening and closing a lid on a container.

Does it open to far or not far enough?

A design never stays in its original form and changes are a natural part of the process.

CAD provides a systematic way to approach these situations.

The result is a process that can be tracked, followed, and used to make decisions. 

Stunning Looks, Exceptional Functionality

Two keys to an aesthetically pleasing part are symmetry and clean surface finishes. 

Why would you say that?

Visual symmetry promotes order and organization over chaos. 

The appearance of visual symmetry helps a customer know that thought has been put into the product they are looking at.

Imperfections left in surface finishes; such as swirls in paint, seam lines, or layer lines in an Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printed part. 

These imperfections reduce sophistication and quality..

When DFM (Design For Manufacturing) is incorporated into a design, limitations that are a natural part of production processes can be overcome.

What does that look like?

An example of this would be to ensure the location of two surfaces that rub on each other due to motion are not seen from a particular view.

What does that practically look like?

Knowing that the molded part will be a button, design the surface that it rides on to be underneath the face of the button

This ensures that the button still moves up and down, but the wear from two surfaces rubbing each other is not visible when pushing the button.

Final Comments

If you need additional help solving these or other issues, we are here!

Building specialized skills that can master these issues and more takes time

Let King CAD take care of those issues for you. 

Spend your time putting money in your pocket without the dealing with time consuming nuances of CAD systems.