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You obviously have been away from design for a while..... nothing costs 5 cents anymore, nothing. Especially installation costs. Whenever an OEM adds any parts, one of the biggest costs is hard tooling costs. Now youre talking about an injection molded plastic part I guess here. And a fairly large one at that. Im not sure where you want to put a stamped radius on the DC outlet pipe. the attachment flange?. Something in the size of 5" diameter (at the mounting flange) x at least that in length. This is also low volume as compared to many consumer products. This dramatically impacts the piece part cost based on a tool that I would guess could be in the $250k or alot more range. Now lets add logistics to and from that new supplier of this part and lets not forget aftermarket support to maintain a new part for many, many years as weve come to expect. I guarantee now that its plastic warranty , think breakage , will certainly play in here as well, further adding heavy costs. Next, how will this "simple" plastic part attach the sheetmetal? snap in? (perceived quality plays heavy here) a screwing flange of some sort (more new parts) ? .
I personally would prefer a welded sheetmetal flange on my DC outlets for their inherent ruggedness, how many times have you leaned a board vertically against something and they invariably fall over or get knocked down and slam into something? I can picture this happening and shearing off countless 5 cent plastic DC flanges.
Im not sure what you mean by draw stamping a panel either or are you referring to a progressive stamping die of some sort?.
I was referring to bad flow geometry , like multiple 45 degree elbows and not using proper DC piping
Engineering is a compromise. It has to fit in the space available and one has to be able to pay for it. Not every shop can have a dust collector at machine level and a single strait 5 foot perfectlly smooth pipe connecting it. If you would like to spring for a Nordfasb setup, I'll take it but it would require multiple 180 degree turns to attach to my equipment and maintain the strait flow prior to bends and splits. I considered a large plenum floor to ceiling to eliminate the "Y"s and most angles, but the calculations are beyond me and a low pressure drop box is one more thing to clean out.
One only needs about an inch of flange to fit a duct or hose. A radius of only an inch is enough to recover almost all of the airflow necking problem.
I did not post this to generate an argument. It was only to highlight the really stupid and legacy design of many tools.
Cost: You can still buy a solar powered electronic calculator, delivered to your door for $3. Yes scale matters. So does assembly, packaging and shipping. Less tangible is the effect of advertising and customer satisfaction with a superior -preforming design. We are talking about machines that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Stamped, injection molded, fabricated, vacuum formed, blow molded? One can determine the total cost of production and choose the appropriate design. A good engineer understands manufacturing as well as function. Stamping a strip, rolling it, welding, and sealing it to a panel sounds like an expensive operation. I would probably look at Kydex vacuum formed and let the end user screw it on with a strip of double sided tape seal. SOP on many tools. "some assembly required" I was highlighting a drum sander that only produces fine dust. Remember, our tools come from only a handful of OEMs. Where one brand name may sell 100s of one model, the OEM is making tens of thousands of machines with common parts used by all the OEMs. One is of course able to be happy with the status quo and put up with inferior performance. Your choice.
Stupid conversation I once had:
Q: " Why do we do it this way."
A: "Because IBM does it that way."
Q: "But why don't we to this other thing this way."
A: "Because IBM does it that way."
Lazy engineers not doing their job and happy with the status quo. No wonder we went Chapter 11.
I want my dust collection to collect dust. It starts at the machine. I selected a grossly oversize collector to overcome the ducting as it was most economical. It can only work if a machine can feed it.