You should know as much as reasonably possible, especially for the products you're shaping. There is a lot to know and that's why we've started this periodic supplement to Medical Design. It's focused on making medical devices with the latest manufacturing know-how. We'll start with a closer look at chemical milling, a technology well adapted to producing fine detail in tiny parts.

Of course there are other active areas. The challenge all engineers face is that manufacturing advances at such a pace that if you don't keep up with it, you shortchange your designs. For example, a manager at a company that makes medical parts with lasers remarked that the most frequent mistake designers make is to assume some detail or precision is impossible from the tools. Lee Iacocca, former chairman of Chrysler Corp. in the early 1990s, once griped about the opposite problem. Designers at his company seemed to think any design was manufacturable and so concocted stuff that was impossible to make.

Another hazard is designing products so expensive to manufacture, they are soon priced off the market. University professors Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst built a company around the simple idea that reducing the part count of a design makes it less expensive to manufacturing and assemble. In fact, a study on the company Web site (dfma.com) shows that reducing the part count of a product no more technically complex than an electric hand drill could pay off big time. Doing so can lower costs to the point where the drill is more profitable to manufacture in the U.S. than in a low-cost labor area such as China. Not a bad deal. All that for staying up on technology.