This book is the result of over a decade of Gui Cavalcanti teaching hobbyists, makers, artisans, fabricators, programmers and other non-mechanical engineers the fundamentals and rules of thumb of mechanical design, so that they could design and build their own projects from scratch without needing mechanical engineering degrees. While running the Artisan's Asylum makerspace, he found that makers often got frustrated because it was next to impossible to learn how to properly design the physical things they wanted to make; engineering textbooks hid their practical lessons from novices behind a wall of difficult math, industrial part supply websites featured billions of indecipherable component combinations, and many of the actual processes working mechanical engineers used to design projects remain undocumented and learned on the job, despite engineering school. Gui set out to share his passion for design, and make engineering more accessible, by creating a comprehensive introduction to mechanical design that distills complex mathematical concepts into rules of thumb, demystifies the process engineers use to design new projects, and explains how to navigate the world of billions of mechanical components that could be used to make things. Make: Practical Mechanical Design teaches you everything you need to know to start new design projects from scratch, research everything you might need to know to create them, and come up with a plan for how to build exactly the thing you're looking for.

This book introduces novices to such critical fundamentals as the design of rigid and strong structures, the design of assemblies that can move under load, how to select between fasteners, bearings, project materials, and other components, and the processes engineers use to design real things, such as:

• How to fully scope project requirements before work begins
• How to analyze tough design decisions quantitatively, and decide on a best path forward with limited information
• How to design in careful stages, so you don't waste time and throw work away
• How to track the expected costs of a project before any work begins
• How to analyze if a design will work BEFORE you build it

This book uses hands-on projects in every chapter to illustrate design principles and rules of thumb, in order to build an intuitive understanding of the process. The knowledge in these pages is accessible to anyone who has a working understanding of algebra; the goal of this text is to distill complex engineering principles into rules of thumb that can be applied by anyone to their own design problems.