A good prototype doesn’t always tell the whole story

I think a lot of us have seen this at some point: the first sample looks good, the part works, everyone feels pretty confident — and then once more units get made, new issues start to appear.

Fit variation, assembly inconsistency, handling marks, small tolerance problems… things that just didn’t feel obvious in the first prototype.

That doesn’t mean the prototype wasn’t useful. It just means one successful part and a stable repeatable part are not always the same thing.

For me, that’s one of the more interesting transitions in hardware work: the point where a design stops being “promising” and starts proving it can behave consistently.

#sheetmetal# #prototype#