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Engineering and Design

American Metalcraft Industries uses AutoCAD and SolidWorks engineering and design tools to ensure a quality, cost effective outcome for your fabrication project. We will work from your design drawings or provide design and drawing services starting with your verbal or written specifications and sketches – we’re flexible.

Metal fabrication engineering and design began eons ago when man began using non-ferrous metals for tools, weapons, art, and structural elements. The Iron Age began when some person noticed that a certain type of rock yielded iron when heated by the coals of a very hot campfire. Thus blacksmithing was born, the earliest form of ferrous metal fabrication.

The importance of metal fabrication was recognized in ancient times. The Greek god Hephaestus (Roman equivalent: Vulcan) was the blacksmith of the gods in mythology. A supremely skilled artisan whose forge was a volcano; he was assigned the construction of the weapons for the gods, and was himself the god of fire and metalworking.

In the real world, starting from raw materials blacksmiths have been fabricating structural items, farm implements, tools, weapons, and art for a very long time. But it took three thousand years for the science of metallurgy to evolve and for craftsmen to master the art of metalworking engineering and design.

Today, any time metal is manipulated from one state or form into another, it is called metalworking. The term metalworking covers various specialties within two main categories, Machining and Fabrication. Machine Shops are concerned with making parts using machine tools.

There is some Machine Shop overlap, but Fabrication Shops generally transform basic shape raw materials into usable objects via cutting, sawing, bending, welding, brazing, forming, punching, shearing, rolling, spinning, forging, or extruding. The fabricated objects are sometimes usable as is or become assembled into such things as tools, structures, frames, enclosures, or artwork.

Metal fabrication projects begin with ideas about how best to construct parts that meet the needs of the project. The raw ideas become refined via engineering and design. This involves elements of creativity, functional considerations, strength-of-materials, metallurgy, regulations, calculations, aesthetics, and planning resulting in design drawings and bill-of-materials. American Metalcraft Industries has expertise and experience with all elements of fabrication engineering, design, and manufacturing.

For efficient manufacturing & quality control, design instructions must be documented via sketches or formal hand created design drawings or via computer assisted design (CAD).  With computers, designs have become much more precise with predictable outcomes. But if drawn by computer or sketched on a napkin, a drawing allows the fabricator to plan the required materials, methods, and supplies.

The better the design drawing the less chance there is for problems and waste.  CAD drawings allow finished product visualization and ensure that form, fit, and functional issues are evaluated before the first manufacturing step is started. That is why American Metalcraft Industries uses AutoCAD and SolidWorks for the engineering and design of your projects.

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