How things are actually made, at volume and at tolerance.
11 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Metal Casting Industry Technology Roadmap
United States Department of Energy · 1998
Sets out where the metal casting industry loses energy and yield — melting, mould-making, defects — arguing that incremental process control, not new…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Measurement Science Roadmap for Metal-Based Additive Manufacturing
National Institute of Standards and Technology · 2013
Argues that metal additive manufacturing's biggest barrier to industrial adoption is not the printing process itself but the absence of measurement…
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Art of Cutting Metals
Frederick W. Taylor · 1907
Reports twenty-six years of systematic experiments on metal cutting, arguing that cutting speed, feed and tool geometry should be chosen from…
+9 more at this level
12 works
United States Department of Energy
Sets out where the metal casting industry loses energy and yield — melting, mould-making, defects — arguing that incremental process control, not new alloys, is the industry's fastest path to improvement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Institute of Standards and Technology
Argues that metal additive manufacturing's biggest barrier to industrial adoption is not the printing process itself but the absence of measurement standards to qualify a part as reliably as a machined one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frederick W. Taylor
Reports twenty-six years of systematic experiments on metal cutting, arguing that cutting speed, feed and tool geometry should be chosen from measured data rather than a machinist's judgement.
M. E. Merchant
Models the metal-cutting chip as sliding along a single shear plane and derives the cutting forces from that geometry, giving machinists the first predictive theory instead of an empirical feeds-and-speeds table.
David F. Noble
Argues that numerically controlled machine tools were shaped as much by management's desire to displace skilled machinists' judgement as by any technical necessity, challenging the assumption that automation follows a purely technical logic.
Stanley Wolf & Richard N. Tauber
Documents each step of building a transistor on a silicon wafer as a distinct physical-chemistry problem, arguing that fabrication yield is decided by the cumulative interaction of these steps rather than by any one of them.
Geoffrey Boothroyd
Argues that a product's assembly cost is fixed largely at the design stage, before automation is even chosen, and gives a systematic method for scoring a design's ease of automated assembly.
Alexander H. Slocum
Argues that precision comes from deliberately constraining a machine's error motions through kinematic design, not from tighter tolerances or better materials alone.
Geoffrey Boothroyd, Peter Dewhurst & Winston Knight
Argues that reducing a product's part count is usually the single highest-leverage design-for-manufacture decision, and gives a scoring method to make that trade-off explicit rather than intuitive.
American Welding Society
Treats welding as an applied-metallurgy problem first and a fabrication skill second, arguing that most weld defects are predictable from the thermal cycle a joint experiences rather than from operator error alone.
Tim A. Osswald, Lih-Sheng Turng & Paul J. Gramann
Treats injection moulding as a fluid-mechanics and heat-transfer problem inside a closed mould, arguing that most part defects are decided during filling and packing rather than at the design stage.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Treats manufacturing as a statistics problem: every process varies, so the engineering question is which sources of variation can be controlled and which must be designed around.
link checked 17 Sept 2026