Neal Drapeau

My passion is making products come to life. Mechanical design is my professional focus, but I enjoy wearing multiple hats and crossing into other engineering disciplines.

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What I Do

Design

My personal design philosophy is to minimize complexity as much as possible while still ensuring requirements are met. By designing things in the simplest way, it often reduces problems down the road and improves reliability, assembly time, and testability.

Build

Being involved in the assembly and testing of prototypes is an important part of my design process. I enjoy getting to work hands-on with tools, and I've found that putting together designs myself is one of the fastest ways to identify and correct design issues.

Optimize

It's important to me that designs not only meet requirements, but do so in the most efficient way possible. I always utilize design tools such as FEA, tolerance analyses, and Design for Manufacturing principles to ensure designs are fully capable without being overdesigned or unnecessarily burdensome to produce.

Document

I believe it's important to create thorough yet succinct documentation to accompany all design work. I've seen how good documentation (or the lack thereof) can make or break organizations. It's important to me that all work I do is fully documented and easily accessible. This applies to everything from basic analysis work to the design of the final product.

Quick Skills

Design Programs

SolidWorks

Fusion 360

Meshmixer

Coding Languages

Matlab

JavaScript

Arduino/C

HTML/CSS

Prototyping Skills

3D Printing

Woodworking

Metalworking

Welding

DfM Knowledge

CNC Machining

Injection Molding

Etching

Sheet Metal

Die Casting