Welcome to our DFM Legends series where we share renowned DFM nerds and their stories as they engineer their way through ambitious DFM challenges. 🤓 This story centers on a young Henry Ford challenging the system and designing for reliability before his name was well known.

Ford had an audacious vision to bring the automobile to the masses. His problem: most people did not take him seriously. Consequently, he was quickly going broke.  

Influencing and Convincing Others to Design for Manufacturability

Ford's problem was not technical in nature. As one of the founding fathers of the production line, Ford had a deep understanding of how to design and manufacture to the masses, before mass production was popular. Unfortunately, a deep understanding of these technical details alone was not going to cut it for investors.

Lets face it, this was 1901:

• The mass production line didn't really exist yet.
• Gas stations didn't really exist yet.
• Venture capital didn't exist.
• Automobiles are exotic.  

At the time, Ford worked for Thomas Edison, and everyone (except for Edison) thought Ford was crazy for making a gas car instead of an electric car.

Where would you get gas... a gas station? 🙄

In this era, the only thing noteworthy about automobiles was the dangerous sport of racing. So, how does Ford influence others in his vision to produce automobiles for the masses?  

Ford challenges the leading racer of the day, Henry Winton to a race!

“I never thought anything of racing, but the public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than a fast toy. Therefore later we had to race.” - Ford

Furious Design for Reliability

Ford was anything but a racer, so the odds were fully stacked against him. Nonetheless, the Ford team went to work, intensely engineering a state of the art 2 cylinder fuel injection system with porcelain insulated spark coils. With 26 horse power, Ford's car set a speed record for 72 mph in half a mile. Not only was this car fast, it was also designed robustly due to Ford's innovative porcelain insulated design.

On Oct. 10, 1901 Ford and Winton faced of in a 10 lap race at Gross Point Race Track in Detroit. For most of the race, Ford was trailing well behind Winton, but sometime around the 8th lap, Winton's car began to give out.  Turns out Winton's injection system was not designed for quality. Consequently, Ford's reliably designed porcelain insulated coils allowed him to close in and win the race. Thus, Ford become an overnight sensation.  

DFM's Culture of Challenge!

With this fame, Ford went on to become a legend in DFM, creating the benchmark for all assembly lines and introducing the automobile to the masses. Likely, none of that would have happened if he had not first challenged Winton to a race.

DFM is more than just engineering. DFM is about challenging the system. Sometimes you need to audaciously challenge the ones at the top to a race! Or, some equivalently off beat challenge in order to get things moving! Only then can you get started on some awesome engineering work.

Big thank you to Ford for the inspiration and pictures behind this article.

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Welcome to our DFM Legends series where we share renowned DFM nerds and their stories as they engineer their way through ambitious DFM challenges. 🤓

This article centers on two of my favorite Steves: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As with any DFM folklore, some details may be fictionalized but still based on a true account of DFM culture at its finest.

Enlisting and rallying the DFM nerds

Before this duo of Steves' founded Apple they were 2 awkward kids roaming Silicone Valley with a passion for tech. Legend has it, one day a young teenaged Steve Jobs wandered into the Atari building and refused to leave until they gave him a job. Intrigued by this, CEO Nolan Bushnell hired Steve as a technician.

Shortly after, Jobs was banished to working the night shift because he smelled really bad and refused to take showers.  Evidently, he so smelled so bad that nobody at Atari could work near him. Woz worked as an engineer across town at Hewlett-Packard. After work, he would often come to hang out with Jobs at Atari.

One day, Bushnell went searching for anyone to design his new game idea - Breakout. Most of the staff seemed disinterested, seeing this as a sort of pong reboot, so Bushnell turned to Jobs.  Bushnell knew that Jobs didn't have the technical chops to complete the game, but also knew that Jobs' best friend Steve Wozniak would come and hang out with Jobs at night. Bushnell was hoping Jobs would bait Woz into helping.  

The DFM challenge - design for minimal chip count

Bushnell tasked Jobs with a timeless DFM Challenge: Do this with the least amount of chips. Woz had become a Silicone Valley legend in designing with minimal chip usage and was officially hooked.

Bushnell offered $700 to complete the game and apparently also offered a bonus for each chip saved. The 2 agreed to split the $700 50%/50%, but it remains a mystery if Jobs hid the chip reduction bonus from Woz or if the bonus ever even existed.

Iterating and executing to the extreme

The 2 Steves worked day and night on a critical 4 day timeline. Why such a short timeline? Not because Atari required it, but instead because Jobs wanted to go to an apple orchard commune over the weekend and needed some fast cash!  The 2 stayed up for 4 days straight and apparently worked so hard they caught mononucleosis.

By day 4, Woz had created a successful game with a legendary 44 chips!  Typical Atari games benchmarked at 150-170 chips.  Legend has it, the game was so intricately designed to utilize these chips, that no other engineer could fully figure out how it worked and they needed to add back a few chips for mass production.

Strange fact, to this day it was never known exactly how much Jobs was paid. Some say he received a cash bonus for chips not used and never told Woz. Jobs denied this claim throughout his life, but Woz forever remains suspicious. 🤨

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DFM 4.0 provides a deep dive into the unconventional culture and principles that make for absurdly great design for manufacturability.

Yes, we cover the technical and engineering aspects of DFM, but that really just scratches the surface of all that is DFM.  Our intent is to go far deeper, exploring where culture, emotion, artwork and humanities converge with excellent engineering. DFM 4.0 is a reboot of generations of DFM technical knowledge, combined with the people and culture (or counter-culture) that brought us this knowledge. We're about the people that continue to innovate in Design and Manufacturability today, and the stories they bring with them. We are about engineering not only great products, but also the great cultures that innovate great products.

Building DFM Momentum

Great DFM culture is in so many ways like the Flywheel defined in Jim Collins book Good to Great.  What is a Flywheel? A flywheel is one of the oldest engineering means of storing energy.  How does it work?  It's simply a massive wheel that is spun, and hence the kinetic energy is captured in the spinning of this mass.  A common historical application is a pottery wheel.  It's massive base is brought up to speed, and the weight of the base keeps the table spinning while the clay is formed.  Collins argues that great cultures are built over time, with many small pushes from passionate people driven by a common cause. Eventually, that momentum builds into a powerful force that transcends companies into greatness.

Great DFM cultures are centered around this drive to constantly make designs better, simpler, and more elegant. This drive is felt at every level of the organization, but perhaps most strongly at the engineering and technical levels. It comes from the engineers in the lab, passionately testing and redesigning, the technicians experimenting better ways to put parts together, and the operators with the curiosity to ask why.   All of these passionate efforts act as small pushes on a massive flywheel, with each of those pushes building momentum. Great DFM management seeks to nurture these pushes, and clear any obstacles inhibiting creativity.  Furthermore, great DFM leadership empowers innovators to be creative while challenging accountability for their results.  Likewise, great DFM innovators challenge the status quo, and cannot turn away from the drive to engineer better, holding themselves accountable to deliver results. These actions characterize the many pushes that build a powerful cultural momentum which transforms companies and products.

Is the flywheel designed for manufacturability?

The flywheel is perhaps the perfect embodiment for DFM. It's arguably the simplest designed battery, technically made from just a single part. This ancient storage device is still used today in high tech applications. One perfect application is in satellites orbiting the earth from space. As they pass around the earth, the solar panels that power these satellites are only in direct sunlight when passing between the earth and sun. As they travel away from the sun, they require a means to store the collected energy. Chemical batteries require replacement and can be prone to reliability issues. What better means to store energy than utilizing a single massive flywheel, spun by electromagnetics? This device, made from just a single part, can operate incredibly efficiently in a virtually frictionless environment (space). Its powerful and robust design ensures a high degree of reliability due to its simplicity in nature.  Hence, the flywheel is a perfect analogy for DFM both technically and culturally.

Thanks for reading!

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