Introduction

Vale Machinery Design was approached to design and develop a piece of equipment to assemble 4 injection moulded components together for an interiors application. Crucially, the design of the injection moulded components should be influenced by the move towards automated assembly.

An existing component was located and reviewed photo coming soon. The left image shows a simple explosion of the parts desgined for automated assembly. Features remain similar to the existing parts, with added features such as rounded corners to aid with mechanically sorting the parts.

A first assembly was designed and built in Onshape which focussed on a single part of the assembly phase - orientating the main carrier body.

As of July 8th 2026, parts are on order for this and the next phase of the project will be to build a first iteration of the carrier orientating unit using FDM 3D printing where possible to reduce fabrication costs before knowing truly that the concept delivers.