Introduction
Human beings are not infallible(1). They make mistakes. Plastics product designers are human beings and can therefore be expected to make mistakes. I am reluctant to admit it, but I have made more than my fair share of plastic product design mistakes.
My only excuse is that plastic technology was not taught at my university. As a result, I learned about designing with plastic on the job, in the school of hard knocks, by reading the plastics industry magazines and the few relevant books that existed back then.
I like to believe I also learned from my own frequent mistakes. However, it didn’t take very long for me to realize that it would be faster and less costly to learn from the mistakes being made by other designer engineers. I started saving stories of these mistakes in design.
In September of 1981 I had the good fortune to be named as the design editor of the highly respected Plastic Design Forum (PDF) magazine. This was a wonderful job that gave me an opportunity and the freedom to promote my design philosophy to the plastics products design community.
In the normal course of events, I wrote an article about a plastics part that failed for lack of attention to the basic plastics part design guidelines. That mistake resulted in the death of an innocent person.
This article was well-received and the PDF editors asked for more stories about why plastic parts failed and how those failures were eliminated. After a few part failure articles, the editors established a recurring PDF column entitled “The Gallery of Goofs”.
They chose the word goof(2) instead of failure or mistake as those words sounded too harsh in the politically correct society we were living in at that time.
For obvious reasons, the names of the people, companies and suppliers mentioned in these articles were changed to protect the guilty. In some articles the application was also disguised.
I have been designing plastic parts since 1957. Unfortunately, the same mistakes I made over sixty years ago are still being made today. I admit that my work as a consultant and expert witness in plastics product failure litigations brings me into contact with more plastics part failures that the average product designer. Be that as it may, there is obviously something missing in how plastics designers are being educated.
With that thought in mind, SPE’s Product Design and Development Division will be including some of the PDF Gallery of Goofs articles in future newsletters. Hopefully those reading the newsletter will benefit by learning about these reviews of real life plastic part failures and how these defects were resolved.
Glenn L. Beall
Glenn Beall Plastics
Webster’s Dictionary
(1) Infallible – incapable of erring.
(2) Goof – an incompetent, foolish or stupid person.
A careless mistake or a slip.