We help create lots of IP and trade secrets over the course of projects. This is core to the value of hiring someone like Design Concepts and we treat this output with extreme care and maintain its confidentiality. But when it comes to our process and our tools, we are an open book. We enjoy holding workshops and sharing ideas at our After Hours events.

To open up even more, we feel like it’s time to start sharing some of the tools we’ve created and adapted with you. Some of these will be very niche, some will be universal. Some won’t be easy to use without training or expertise. Some will.

An open source / open book approach starts conversations, sparks creativity and, maybe most importantly, raises the quality of materials, tools, and results. We are inspired by Wikipedia and Linux’s missions to facilitate user-generated material that is free and accessible to the world. We are inspired by the promise of trust-based organizations and see a bright future as technologies like blockchain allow more confident transfer of data.

Our first “open source” tool is our Tolerance Analysis spreadsheet. Our mechanical engineers use this tool frequently. Making sure parts will fit together all the time, balancing performance and cost, is a critical part of the detailed engineering effort. This “simple” method of tolerance analysis serves the purpose for most design efforts. If you choose to give this spreadsheet a try, let us know what you think and how you might improve it.

Click here to download the spreadsheet.

In the future we will be adding CAD tools and other useful engineering tools that we hope you can benefit from. Keep checking back in our Downloads section as we add these tools.