What Tools Do Industrial Designers Use

All Industrial Design programs have shops filled with stationary, power and hand tools. But students are still required to carry some basics as we learn the craft of putting things together.

Hot Glue Gun

The quintessential tool for adhering anything to anything, and the bond was always guaranteed to last until about five minutes before you were scheduled to present your work.

Enter a caption (optional)

Soldering Iron and Solder

For making wireframes, wireframes, and more wireframes. And I'm pretty sure the solder we used in the early '90s still had lead in it, which explains me and my classmates' mental states.

Enter a caption (optional)

Come to think of it, given the fact that we pulled a lot of all-nighters and frequently kept the hot tip of both this and the glue gun right next to a stack of newsprint drawings, I'm kind of amazed that none of us burned the studio down.

Needlenose Pliers

For when you needed to bend small radii for your wireframes and your fingers wouldn't do. This may be the only tool I've got left over from my original ID school toolbox that I still use around the house on a regular basis.

Enter a caption (optional)

Dremel

To rough things out in blue foam, you needed to use three tools in order:

1. The stationary hotwire cutter in the shop for 2D roughing
2. One of the rasps out of the tool closet for 3D roughing
3. A Dremel to do the fine detail work

Enter a caption (optional)

This thing would get pretty hot if you used it for too long, but the good news is that at 19 years old carpal tunnel syndrome is still a long ways off.

X-Acto Knife & Blades

Possibly the tool I used the most throughout the entire degree program. Used to cut everything from the various types of paper to acetate to scoring balsa wood, and in a pinch you could get acceptable curves in foamcore if you used it like a slow-motion reciprocating saw.

Enter a caption (optional)

Utility Knife & Blades

Some students used these to cut the endless matte boards for presentations. At Pratt we used these to settle scores in the cafeteria.

Enter a caption (optional)

Beveled Matte Cutter

Not everyone had one of these, but I invested in one under the illusion that if I cut my matte board windows at a 45-degree bevel, it would make my presentation drawings look like they didn't suck. And one real benefit of this tool was that with a sharp blade it allowed you to cut through matte boards in a single pass, unlike the multiple passes you'd have to take with a score-settling knife.

Enter a caption (optional)

Mine didn't look like the one in these photos, by the way; I couldn't find an image for the all-silver one I had as it's no longer made, probably because it sucked.

Metal Ruler with Cork/Rubber/Foam Lining

At some point you cut foamcore with an all-metal ruler or metal T-square flipped over. And the ruler would slip midway through the cut, leaving you with a curved line. Then you'd try to use A-clamps on one end, but the ruler would bow in the middle. So finally you wised up and spent the extra few bucks on a ruler that had some no-slip texture on the back.

Enter a caption (optional)

Razor Blades

These were cheaper to buy in bulk than utility knife blades, and made a way better cut through 1/4" foamcore. The trade-off was that they were ergonomically poor, especially if you had to do dozens or hundreds of cuts.

Enter a caption (optional)

Soda Can or Plastic Bottle

Not really a tool, but with all of the blades we went through—X-Acto, utility, razors—you couldn't just toss those things into the garbage when you were done with them or the custodian would have cuts all over his body. So you had to have something on your desk to toss the spent sharps into. If a plastic bottle, the cap was the lid; if a soda can, you taped over the opening, then slit it with the first blade you dropped into it, and the little slit was usually enough to keep the blades from spilling out if you knocked it over.

Enter a caption (optional)

_______________________________________________________________________

These weren't the sole extent of what we all carried, of course, but this is pretty close to the bare minimum that you'd find in everyone's kit.

Ex-ID students of a certain age: What'd I miss?

Current ID students: Do they make you guys cut matte boards for presentations, or is it all digital now?

Up Next: The actual objects we used in order to carry all of this crap around.

Read the rest of the What Industrial Design Students Had to Carry series here:

Part 1: Drawing Implements

Part 2: Drawing and Drafting Supplies

Part 3 : Paper

Favorite
Comment
&

Rain Noe

I'm a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I'd die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.