Thoughts and commments about "Rapid Prototyping: Principles and Applications in Manufacturing"

From: Karl R. Denton (karldenton@ameritech.net)
Date: Sat Dec 19 1998 - 15:20:02 EET


A little easier to read...

Hello All,

As most of you know I have been at times a little out spoken about things on
this list that I feel are worth the aggravation of getting blasted by those
that would disagree. I am about to make that same decision about a book that
was mentioned on this mailing list and that I purchased recently. As most of
you also know I have over the past 7 years collected a substantial library
of material on the RP topic (see http://www.advtechconsult.com/Library.html
for a complete listing) I have a great deal of respect for the authors and
creators of this material as I know first hand what is involved in the
research and development end of things as well as the time and effort it
takes to create a well thought out paper or book.

The book that I speak of is "Rapid Prototyping: Principles and Applications
in Manufacturing" Written by Chua Chee Kai and Leong Kah Fai, Published by
John Whiley & Sons, Inc., ISBN 0-471-19004-7

On receiving this book I removed the CD from the back cover and noticed a
table (Appendix B) that listed all of the RP case studies that had been
included in the book so I looked on with interest. I was some what surprised
to see the work in there that I had done while at Ford Motor Company and
indeed work that others had done at Ford Motor Company and the listed
reference for these case studies was the Rapid Prototyping Report from
CAD/CAM Publishing! As I looked through the table I discovered the
following:

11 Case studies cited the Rapid Prototyping Report as the reference,
5 Case studies cited the Edge (3D Systems news letter) as the reference,
5 Case studies cited StrataBrief (Staratasys's news letter) as the
reference,
3 Cited something called "Catalouge" (I assume a sales pamphlet) as the
reference.

So of the 43 case studies listed in the book over half of them used either
the Rapid Prototyping Report or a corporate sales news letter. Before I get
blasted by those defending the Rapid Prototyping Report, I hold the report
in the highest regard! I know how hard it is to "editorialize" a document to
make it "fit" within a given range. The work that I did was described in
about 18 to 20 pages of text (could easily have been more) and it was edited
down to fit in the Rapid Prototyping Report which in it's entirety is 8
pages. This means that some information must go! It's a matter of logistics.
With the authors of the above named book using this condensed version of
those 11 case studies for a project like a book makes me wonder how they can
be sure the proper information is getting out to their audience, and indeed
there are errors in the text of the book (not major ones but errors in the
data reported).

Then there are the case studies based on sales pamphlets or corporate news
letters! I know that every company that manufacturers RP equipment writes
their material to show them selves in the best possible light, with this in
mind how can these case studies be considered factual without having the
originator or the creator of the project consulted. Shame on the
manufacturers for not providing the names and addresses of the creators of
these case studies and if they did an even bigger shame on the authors for
not consulting with them.

I assume that this book will be used as a text in engineering courses and it
bothers me that the students will not be getting the "whole story".One other
thing that bothers me about the authors of this book is that they chose NOT
to mention any of the "persons" involved in these case studies. They were
not referenced in any of the chapters nor were they mentioned in the
Acknowledgments section of the book. At a minimum I would have expected some
form of a comment like "and thanks to all of the people who did the work
mentioned in this book"!

As for the rest of the book it looks like a clean cut well displayed and
easy to read piece of work, I wonder though just how much of it had been
thoroughly researched vs. pulled from sales literature or news letters. I
value good technical information about this industry every chance that I can
get my hands on it and after my initial look at "Rapid Prototyping:
Principles and Applications in Manufacturing" I wonder just what I have!

Karl R. Denton

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