Engineering & Design Support
- Leverage Our Deep Engineering Expertise
- Increase Your Odds of Project Success
- Bring Your New Products to Market Faster
Speed Your Time to Market
with Our Diverse Team of Engineers, Designers and Builders
An Unmatched Breadth of Engineering Expertise
Collectively, our nationwide network of locations offer decades of engineering experience and expertise across a comprehensive array of technologies. Whether your needs are for prototype, bridge, short- or long-run part production, our team can help you bring your concepts to life and simplify your supply chain with practical part design and manufacturing solutions.
Expertise to Support All Your Prototyping and Production Needs
When you partner with an outside firm to have parts manufactured, top-notch engineering is a critical requirement. There are many variables involved in producing affordable parts that are consistently high quality – including part design, manufacturing method, material selection, manufacturability and designing efficient production processes.
Hiring a less experienced partner is risky. It can lead to part quality problems, cost overruns and endless delays. And that can negatively impact your reputation as a supplier to YOUR customers.
An experienced engineering and design partner, on the other hand, can help you avoid those problems. They know what challenges to anticipate based on the geometry of your part. They’re intimately familiar with the pros and cons of each manufacturing method. They can help you achieve the perfect balance of design, materials, manufacturing method and finishing options to produce parts that meet all your requirements – and help you avoid the headaches that a less-structured approach can cause.
The engineering and design team at Fathom has decades of experience and expertise in everything from additive manufacturing and injection molding to sheet metal fabrication and CNC machining.
5 Ways to Leverage Our Expertise
Here are five ways that the Fathom engineering and design team can support you during your product development and production processes:
Additive Manufacturing Expertise
Fathom provides extensive know-how to help their customers optimize the part designs and material selections to improve manufacturability, save money and improve part quality. We can help you identify and solve geometry- and process-specific problems that DFM algorithms tend to miss.
- Use design optimization with generative tools specific to additive.
- Apply direct digital manufacturing (DDM) tools and development processes.
- Utilize extensive knowledge of additive materials and processes.
- Access to in-house additive printing equipment.
Design For Manufacturing (DFM) Guidance
Fathom’s in-house production capabilities are paired with a large network of equally skilled in-house specialists. Depend on our knowledge and resources to inform key design decisions—especially manufacturing nuances for your part’s unique geometry. Our team works collaboratively, so we can carefully identify risks earlier in development and effectively meet your design and manufacturing requirements.
- Assembly fixture and jig design
- Design for injection molding
- Tool design and refinement
Mechanical Concept Development
Fathom offers creative yet simple design solutions to meet your product’s functional goals with the best production processes for each stage of development.
- Device and enclosure development
- Component integration
- Large-scale fabrications
- Experts in multiple CAD software formats
- Iterative design using in-house equipment
- Methods to increase speed and decrease cost of development
Advanced Prototyping
Work with Fathom to build a prototype to ensure your part is designed with final production in mind.
- Expedited prototyping with on-site 3D printing services for fast turnarounds on parts
- In-house CNC machining, turning, casting, molding and cutting
- Rapid prototyping and iterative testing
- Functional, aesthetic or fully-integrated prototypes
Production Support
Anyone can build a prototype. Engineering a product so it can be mass-produced requires a different set of skills that require technology expertise so that guidelines may either be followed or creatively managed to simplify your unique production output.
Fathom’s engineering staff can help you improve the manufacturability of your parts, ensuring that they can be made cost-effectively at a consistently high level of quality and that they will perform well in their end-use applications. Whether you need bridge, low or full production parts, we can design a production solution that is cost-effective and practical.
- Optimize designs for manufacturability
- Suggest design changes that will streamline the manufacturing process (e.g., eliminating overhanging part features to eliminate the need for side actions for injection mold tools)
- Suggest alternate approaches to minimize the need for post-processing
Why Work with Fathom’s Team of Experts?
Our diverse team of engineers, designers and builders can help guide your NPI projects from definition to production.
Define // Every project has unique development and manufacturing challenges. Our engineers will collaborate with you to help you refine your technical requirements. We will recommend a logical prototype path with an appropriate end-manufacturing process in mind.
Design & Rapid Prototype // We’ll leverage our in-house additive technologies, CNC machining, urethane casting, injection molding and fabrication experts to quickly provide you with prototype parts for early-stage validation.
Refined Design & Prototype Fabrication // Our engineers and designers can help you quickly iterate your part designs into more refined prototypes that you can use to evaluate fit, finish, and functionality. We can even help you move your product into bridge production for in-field testing and evaluation.
Production // Whether you need bridge, low- or full-production, we’ll help you develop a finalized design that is tailored for optimal production.
