Making It: Manufacturing Technologies for Product Design.

Chris Lefteri.
Laurence King. 2007. 240 pages.

Lugging home a newly purchased (albeit second-hand) copy of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Engineering I imagined I was about to get a window into the world of manufacturing processes. How can you go wrong with three kilos of industrial wisdom (for $18) at your fingertips? Hang on, what's this 'Verson-Wheelon process' business...? No, this was not meant for me...

It seems Chris Lefteri has seen this scenario before, acknowledging that engineering texts can be 'unsympathetic to the way designers operate'. But why get so wrapped up in the details?

When a design leaves the studio and enters the factory, it's likely to experience some kind of interpretation before it becomes an object. The less interpretation required by the manufacturer, the closer to the original design, so it's definitely in the designer's interest to meet the manufacturer more than half way.

To help the designer see the manufacturer's perspective, Making It covers nearly a hundred manufacturing techniques. It replaces formulae and Churchill Tool numbers with information on tolerances and relevant materials.

Far beyond simply describing the processes, Lefteri backs each one up with typical uses, history, materials, finish and many more relevant attributes. Comprehensive indexing adds further to it's value as a reference and it remains readable thanks to the variety of examples and incidental information.

Making It is hard to fault - unless you're foolish enough to buy books on a kilo-per-dollar basis.