Tool Design and Lab

Course Description

Tool Design and Lab is an entry-level course addressing theory, principles and techniques for the modern design of part holding devices, jigs, fixtures and tooling, including related drawings, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (G,D & T), and efficiency calculations.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ETD is the Engineering Technology Drafting prefix and the C suffix marks a combined lecture-and-laboratory course. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered spring, with a $60 laboratory fee. ⚠ The single term of offering is worth planning around.

Tool design is where drafting stops being drawing and becomes engineering. A jig or fixture has to locate a part completely and repeatably, hold it against cutting forces without distorting it, allow the tool access, allow chips to escape, allow the operator to load and unload quickly and safely, and cost less than the time it saves. Those requirements conflict, and resolving them is design. The geometric tolerancing content is what makes it possible to say precisely what the fixture must achieve.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for this course. The C-suffixed courses in these prefixes run consistently at 20 contact hours per credit — ETD2320C at 4 credits and 80 hours, and ETD2364C, ETS2542C and ETS3543C all at 3 credits and 60 — while the unsuffixed lecture courses run at 15 (ETG2520 and EGN3311, both 3 and 45). This course is priced at the C-form convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the purpose and types of jigs and fixtures.
• Describe workholding principles and their objectives.
• Apply the 3-2-1 location principle to constrain a part.
• Analyse degrees of freedom and confirm full location.
• Select and place locators appropriately.
• Design clamping that holds without distorting the part.
• Position clamping forces against cutting forces correctly.
• Describe chip clearance and coolant considerations.
• Design for safe and rapid loading and unloading.
• Describe tool guidance elements such as bushings.
• Select materials for tooling components.
• Describe standard and commercially available tooling components.
• Read and apply geometric dimensioning and tolerancing symbols.
• Establish and interpret a datum reference frame.
• Apply tolerances of form, orientation, location, and runout.
• Describe maximum material condition and bonus tolerance.
• Interpret a feature control frame correctly.
• Perform a tolerance stack-up analysis.
• Relate part tolerance to the tolerance required of the fixture.
• Produce complete and unambiguous tooling drawings.
• Perform efficiency and cost justification calculations.
• Evaluate whether a tool is economically justified.
• Describe modular and quick-change tooling.
• Apply safety requirements to tooling and workholding design.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe fixture design for automated and robotic cells.
• Describe press tooling and die design at an introductory level.
• Describe additive manufacturing of tooling.
• Describe inspection fixtures and gauging.
• Describe design for manufacture and assembly.
• Model tooling in a solid modelling package.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Jigs and fixtures
• Workholding principles
• The 3-2-1 location principle
• Degrees of freedom
• Locator selection and placement
• Clamping without distortion
• Clamping against cutting forces
• Chip clearance and coolant
• Loading and unloading
• Tool guidance and bushings
• Tooling materials
• Standard components
• GD&T symbols
• Datum reference frames
• Form, orientation, location, and runout
• Maximum material condition and bonus tolerance
• Feature control frames
• Tolerance stack-up
• Part tolerance versus fixture tolerance
• Tooling drawings
• Efficiency and cost calculations
• Economic justification
• Modular and quick-change tooling
• Tooling safety

Optional Topics

• Fixtures for automated cells
• Press tooling and dies
• Additive manufacturing of tooling
• Inspection fixtures and gauging
• Design for manufacture and assembly
• Solid modelling of tooling

Resources & Tools

• Your own calculator and a systematic solution format — given, find, assumptions, working, answer with units, sanity check. Adopting one format now is worth more than any single technique in these courses.
• ABET (abet.org) — free accreditation lookup; check which commission accredits your programme before assuming a licensure pathway.
• NCEES (ncees.org) — free information on the FE and PE examinations and state-by-state requirements; the FE reference handbook is free and is a superb formula reference for these courses.
• Florida Board of Professional Engineers (fbpe.org) — free; the authority on Florida licensure.
• Engineering Toolbox and NIST reference data — free property tables and unit conversions; verify anything critical against a primary source.
• Professional societies — ASME, IEEE, ASHRAE, IISE, and ASQ all offer inexpensive student membership, standards access, and local chapter meetings where employers recruit.
• Your programme's laboratory and your instructors — the equipment time is the part you cannot get elsewhere, and it is already paid for.
• Internships and co-op placements — the single strongest predictor of employment at graduation in this field. Start looking a year before you think you should.
• ASME Y14.5 — the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing standard; your library or department will have it, and reading the actual standard rather than a summary is what separates people who can apply GD&T from people who can recognise it.
• Component manufacturers' catalogues (Carr Lane, Jergens, and others) — free, extensively illustrated, and effectively textbooks in workholding practice.
• SME — Society of Manufacturing Engineers (sme.org) — student membership and certification pathways.

Career Pathways

• Mechanical engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3027.
• Electrical and electronic engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3023.
• Industrial engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3026.
• Manufacturing and production engineering support — process improvement, tooling, and quality.
• Quality engineering and inspection — SOC 51-9061 at technician level, rising into quality engineering.
• Maintenance and reliability engineering — consistently in demand and under-applied for.
• Controls, automation, and systems integration — among the best paid technical work available without a four-year engineering degree.
• Utilities and power — a substantial Florida sector, with generation, transmission, and distribution employment plus storm restoration work.
• Aerospace, defence, and space — Florida's Space Coast is one of the densest concentrations of this work in the country; ⚠ many roles require U.S. citizenship and some a security clearance.
• Theme park and attraction engineering — a genuine and distinctive Florida employer of mechanical, controls, and maintenance engineering talent.
• Building systems, HVAC, and energy management — steady work with a strong Florida market.
• Continue to a bachelor's or a graduate degree — Daytona State's engineering technology bachelor's programmes are the direct route, and see the licensure note about what that degree does and does not qualify you for.
• Mechanical drafter — SOC 17-3013.
• Tool and die designer, and tooling engineer — specialised, well paid, and persistently short of people.
• Manufacturing engineering technician — process and tooling support on the factory floor.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Geometric tolerancing is not decorated plus-or-minus — and this is where students go wrong

• The commonest misunderstanding is treating GD&T as a fancier way of writing a tolerance. It is a different thing: it specifies the geometric relationship a feature must have to a defined reference frame, which plus-or-minus dimensioning simply cannot express.
• ⚠ The datum reference frame is the whole foundation. Datums establish how the part is located for inspection, and choosing them badly produces a drawing that is precise, inspectable, and describes the wrong thing.
• Choose datums that reflect how the part actually functions and mounts, not whichever surface is convenient to draw from.
• The order of the datums matters — primary, secondary, tertiary is a sequence of constraint, not a list.
• ⚠ A position tolerance is a zone, not a range. The circular tolerance zone it defines is larger than the square one implied by equivalent plus-or-minus dimensions — which means GD&T frequently allows more manufacturing freedom while controlling function better.
• Maximum material condition gives bonus tolerance, and understanding it is what turns GD&T from a constraint into a cost saving.
• Do the stack-up. Individually acceptable tolerances can accumulate into an assembly that does not fit, and this is discovered on the shop floor if it is not discovered on paper.
• The fixture must be more accurate than the part it holds — a common rule of thumb is roughly a tenth of the part tolerance, and a fixture that consumes half the tolerance has already failed.
• Talk to the machinists and the inspectors. A drawing that cannot be made or cannot be measured is a drawing that will be ignored.

⚠ Workholding failures throw parts — design for what happens when it lets go

• A part that comes loose in a machining operation becomes a projectile, and cutting tools shatter. This is the reason workholding is a safety discipline and not only a productivity one.
• Clamp against the cutting force, not perpendicular to it. A clamp that relies on friction to resist the cut is a clamp waiting to slip.
• ⚠ Locate first, then clamp. Clamping should hold the part against its locators, not push it into position — a clamp that moves the part has destroyed the location it was supposed to preserve.
• Do not over-clamp. Excessive force distorts the part, which then springs back after machining and is out of tolerance — a failure that looks like a machining problem and is not.
• Design so the part can only be loaded the right way round. Foolproofing is cheaper than scrap and far cheaper than an accident.
• Keep hands clear. Loading and unloading are when hands are near the cutting zone, and the fixture design determines whether that is necessary.
• Consider chip build-up. Chips accumulating under a locator change the part position gradually, and the resulting drift is baffling if you have not thought about it.
• Inspect fixtures periodically. Locators wear, and a worn fixture produces parts that drift slowly out of tolerance.

⚠⚠ Engineering laboratories store energy — that is the hazard in one phrase

• Loaded specimens, pressurised systems, charged capacitors, energised circuits, springs, and rotating masses all hold energy that can be released suddenly, and almost every serious laboratory injury is a stored-energy release.
• ⚠ A test specimen under load is dangerous at the moment it fails. Fracture releases stored elastic energy and can throw fragments — stay behind the guard, use eye protection, and never lean over a loaded machine.
• Assume rotating machinery will catch anything loose. Long hair tied back, no loose clothing, no gloves near rotating equipment, no jewellery.
• Eye protection every time in the laboratory, not only while you personally are testing. Other people's work is the usual source.
• ⚠ Verify de-energisation before touching anything electrical, and lock out where lockout applies. A capacitor can hold a lethal charge after power is removed.
• Know where the emergency stop, the main disconnect, and the first aid kit are in every laboratory you work in, before you need them.
• Do not operate equipment you have not been trained on, and do not work alone in a laboratory.
• Follow the procedure exactly, and stop when something is unexpected. Improvising a test setup is how equipment is destroyed and people are hurt.
• Report every incident and near miss. A near miss is free information about a hazard that has not hurt anyone yet.

⚠⚠ An engineering answer is a number, a unit, and a judgement about whether it is plausible

• A number without units is not an answer, and unit errors are the single most common source of catastrophic engineering mistakes — including ones that have destroyed spacecraft.
• Carry units through the calculation rather than adding them at the end. If the units do not come out right, the working is wrong, and this catches errors nothing else will.
• ⚠ Sanity-check every result. Ask whether the magnitude is plausible before writing it down — a beam deflecting three metres or a pump drawing a megawatt is telling you something, and the software will not.
• Estimate first, then calculate. An order-of-magnitude estimate made before the analysis is the cheapest error check available.
• Know your assumptions and state them. Every analysis rests on idealisations — rigid bodies, incompressible flow, linear elasticity — and the failures happen where an assumption stopped being true and nobody noticed.
• Significant figures are a claim about precision. Reporting eight digits from a measurement good to two is a misrepresentation, not thoroughness.
• ⚠ Software output is not verification. Analysis packages return confident, well-formatted answers to badly posed problems — you are responsible for the model, the inputs, and whether the result makes sense.
• Show the working. An answer nobody can check is not usable engineering, and in professional practice it is not acceptable.
• Say when you are unsure. Flagging a doubt is what a competent engineer does; concealing it is how failures propagate.

⚠ Engineering technology and professional engineering licensure in Florida

• Engineering practice is regulated in Florida under Chapter 471, Florida Statutes, through the Board of Professional Engineers and FBPE. Offering engineering services to the public and sealing engineering documents require a professional engineer licence.
• ⚠⚠ Engineering technology and engineering are different educational pathways, and the distinction matters for licensure. Licensure routes are built around programmes accredited by ABET, and ABET accredits engineering and engineering technology under separate commissions with different criteria.
• ⚠ A degree in engineering technology may not qualify a graduate for PE licensure on the same terms as an engineering degree, and in some states not at all. Requirements differ by state and they change.
• If professional licensure is your goal, establish the route before you enrol — ask FBPE directly, ask the programme what its graduates have actually done, and get the answer in writing. This is the same unrecoverable trap this repository records for allied health accreditation, and it is discovered just as late.
• The industry exemption matters in practice. A great deal of engineering work performed inside a manufacturing company does not require a licence, which is why many engineering technology graduates have full technical careers without one.
• Certification is a separate and useful route — NICET, ASQ, and manufacturer certifications are recognised by employers and do not depend on the degree's accreditation category.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Licensure requirements, accreditation criteria, and reciprocity between states all change — verify with FBPE and NCEES rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live in these prefixes, since Daytona State offers both associate-level and bachelor of science in engineering technology coursework in them.

ETD2465C is a combined lecture-and-laboratory course, published at 3 credits and approximately 60 contact hours, offered spring only at Daytona State, with a $60 laboratory fee.

See this repository's ETD2320C, ETD2364C, and ETS4502C guides for the surrounding drafting and metrology courses.