Course Overview:

You can purchase this course for $199 or join the Hardware Academy to access all of our courses for only $49/month.

In this course you are going to learn how to properly design an enclosure (or any other custom plastic part) so that it can be produced using injection molding which is the technology used for mass manufacturing.

This course is mostly taught by Alex Berrou who is a mechanical engineer highly skilled in 3D product design and injection molding. I teach the first lesson which is a broad overview of some of the design complexities associated with injection molding.

Then Alex takes over and shows you how to make a basic enclosure design example into something that can be injected molded.

This course is a follow-on to the course Introduction to 3D Modeling. In that course you learned the basics of 3D modeling and how to use the 3D modeling software, and a very basic enclosure was designed but it wasn’t ready for mass manufacturing.

In this course that basic design will be turned into something that can be manufactured. If you have no experience with 3D modeling then be sure to finish that course before you proceed with this more advanced course.

I selected Fusion 360 for this course because there are so many ways to get it for free or at a very low cost. SolidWorks on the other hand costs thousands of dollars.

There are four ways for you to get Fusion 360:

1) You can download a free trial.

2) You can use it for free as a startup if your company is less than 3 years old, has less than 10 employees, and has annual revenue under $100,000. You will need to complete a short application to get the free startup license.

3) Due to the Covid-19 pandemic they are currently offering a free commercial license valid through May 31, 2020.

4) The final option is to purchase it, but thankfully it’s quite affordable because it is a subscription based product. You can subscribe to use it for only $60/month or $495/year.