It’s happened to every engineer. Your manager-slash-client-slash designer has the most brilliant vision! But when he tries to convey it to you… well, it might as well be semaphore. Maybe they’re not the most CAD-savvy – after all, that’s what they pay you for, right? So how will you ever understand what you’re supposed to design? There are a thousand different products out there that are supposed to help, but sometimes, it’s refreshing to see someone go back to the basics.

I recently received a design request in the form of a hastily-scribbled pencil sketch. Long story short: it was indecipherable. When I asked for some more clarification, I expected a clearer drawing, or a lot of unhelpful text. What I ended up with actually made me smile!

My client roughly modeled the important area of the part out of clay, took a video and some stills, and sent them over the same day. It cleared up all my confusion, and the project was back on track.

Believe it or not, this helped.

Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best.