Estimating engineering time on machine design

When I estimate any design I like to 1st take into account the customer. If I've worked with this client before and have a feel for how they do things, if they change their mind alot, if their requests are somewhat "Grey" or "Clear" and how much interpretation is involved trying to put their idea on a screen. This has helped me tremendously overtime in avoiding going over my man-hour budgets.

And as far as estimating the time to complete a design, be liberal about it when 1st coming up with the numbers then go back over and see if any parts such as a square plate that doesn't take but 15min to model, dim, and plot out can soak up some of the more complicated parts time usage.

But 2hrs is the average I estimate for anypart that has more than one bend, or more than 4 taps or drills...

K.Josey

"K. Josey" wrote in news:qb3Bc.1799$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr23.news.prodigy.com:

Don't forget competitive quoting and ordering time for the parts also.....this can eat up most of a few days.

It's a good point. Even though I'm doing this as an adjunct to a machine shop who will actually build the machine I've got to take into consideration what time the shop will require me to spend on such tasks as this. We need to have a very detailed and clear definition of task scope. Thanks for the comment.

'Sporky'