Introducing the informal sheet metal design tool

Meet the informal sheet metal design tool, which we designed and manufactured in partnership with our friends at Send Cut Send. Each of its 16 features is designed to showcase cool tips and tricks. The tool purposely showcases what can happen if parts aren’t designed properly, but also shows workarounds to solve the problems. When it’s not busy teaching, it’s hanging out on your desk holding your favorite pens and pencils. 

For those of you who’ve been following this space for a while, you may remember when we launched the plastic informal design puck a few years ago, as a way to showcase good and bad design techniques for injection-molded parts. With this simple tool, we cover texture, draft, radii, ribs, and sink marks. Because, if you’re designing an injection-molded part, it’s good to really understand what that process entails so you’re not surprised when your product comes back with ejection pin markings, sink marks, poor texture, or fitment issues.

We spun up a blog post about the design puck tool, and let readers submit to receive their own sample. We gave them out to friends at CES and at our Punk Rock Party, and we added the tool to our resources library. To date, we’ve received over 200 sample requests.

The one piece of feedback that stuck with us, though, is that folks wished the tool had more utility when it was just sitting on a desk, not being used as a teaching tool. This gave us a good challenge when designing a sheet metal version, which we’re excited to announce today!

To kick off, we want to highlight our four favorite features of the tool, along with notes from our cofounder Sam Holland, who helped design it. We’d love to know what your favorite feature is.

Cool feature #1: Laser-etched font sizes

You’ll find standard font sizing for laser etching at the top on the right. Note how sizes down to 2-point font can be legible, compared to the laser cutting fonts on the left that look bad below 4 points. Bottom line: You can etch any font, but you can only cut certain fonts.

Sam’s note: “Laser etching is a great way to add durable and high-resolution images to your metal parts. Etching tends to have an off-white color on most surfaces, and it really pops on darker surfaces, especially anodized aluminum. When designing for laser-cutting text, you need to use specific fonts designed for stencils to ensure there’s adequate support for closed shapes like 0.”

Cool feature #2: Good & bad holes

Holes too close to a bend line (middle) can distort and cause assembly issues. You can either resolve this by adding a tab and punchout (top) or use a nifty feature called a kerf cut (bottom) to preserve the hole shape.

Sam’s note: “I’ve used the tab and punch out trick a few times to add holes too close to the bend line, but was introduced to the concept of a kerf cut from Bryce and Cutter at Send Cut Send. They called it a lesser-known hack that works surprisingly well. A very thin laser-cut line between the hole and bend edge can help relieve the stress in the metal when bent, preventing holes from distorting. It’s really cool!”

Cool feature #3: PEM nut

PEM fasteners are amazing. Here, we’re using a PEM nut to add an M3 thread to the part. PEM has a variety of threaded and unthreaded standoffs you can add too. They make parts assembly far simpler. We love them. 

Sam’s note: “PEM fasteners are a complete game changer when designing metal parts for assembly. You can stamp in a permanent nut or screw to your parts, drastically simplifying the assembly process. They add cost to each part, but it usually reduces enough assembly time to save money in the long run. Check out their full offerings on PEM’s site.”

Cool feature #4: Material gauge thickness

Each tab represents a stock aluminum sheet-metal gauge. Use the gap between tabs to quickly measure a metal part and identify its gauge. Left to right, in gauges: 18, 14, 12, 1/10″, 8, 3/16″, and 1/4″. 

Sam’s note: “I always have a hard time quickly visualizing sheet metal gauges. These tabs provide a super fast way to visualize real thicknesses, and you can use the gaps to measure real parts. Thanks to Paul Johnson for this recommendation!”

Get your own

That’s just four of the 16 features included on the tool. Explore all 16 features on the site, and if you’re interested, you can buy one for yourself! Just click the “add to cart” button and select which version you’re interested in. Our plastic design pucks are still available too. 

We’ve had a lot of fun designing these tools and hope they’re as handy for you as they have been for us. We couldn’t have made this without help from SendCutSend, especially Bryce, Cutter, and Jim! They’ve been instrumental in creating a useful design guide that’s desk-worthy.

informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware and hardtech. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market, informal has the perfect collection of people for the job.