Plant engineers ask whether OSHA requires polycarbonate guards. The regulation names no material — it sets performance requirements and leaves material, openings, edges and fasteners to the drawing. Here is what 1910.212 actually says, what it leaves to you, and how each decision becomes a callout a fabricator can build to.
You design in CAD daily — but a part sent to a fabrication shop follows different rules than one milled in the department machine shop. The mindset shift to cut-sheet design, the classic first-drawing mistakes, and the two annotations that eliminate an email round-trip.
Brand teams are experts in product, not fabrication — so their first display briefs repeat the same six gaps. Each one has a downstream consequence and a one-line fix; by the end, the fixes assemble into a brief template.
A wayfinding package is one design executed dozens or hundreds of times — room IDs, directionals, level markers sharing one construction and one color build. The fabrication problem is consistency across the quantity, and consistency is manufactured, not assumed.
A one-off display can absorb hand-fitting and touch-up; a 500-store rollout cannot. Volume design is the discipline of deleting hand operations — sheet yield, self-locating joints, pack-out, and the pilot run that proves it all before the warehouse fills.
An acrylic assembly mixes processes — saw, CNC, laser, bonding — and each contributes its own tolerance band to the stack. Why one blanket tolerance on the title block is fiction, and how datum strategy and process selection control stack-up better than tighter numbers.
The most common fixture misfit has one cause: the display was designed to the naked product, and the product sells boxed. The retail unit — product plus packaging as merchandised — is the design object. The three configurations to design for, packaging variance as tolerance input, and the refresh risk to design against.
Fit-up is decided at the drawing stage: per-process tolerance ranges on the exhibit drawings, stack-up managed across the booth run, and critical mating dimensions verified before crating — so the booth assembles the same way in every city, with the receiving check that prevents the midnight knife.
Seven specific spec failures — each paired with the store-floor consequence it produces and the one-line fix for the next RFQ. Wells sized to the box instead of the product, no loaded weight, a finish adjective instead of a grade, and the restock action nobody designed.
A fabrication drawing needs exactly two kinds of tolerance information: a general note referencing the published per-process standard, and explicit callouts on the few features where fit actually matters. Everything else is over-specification — and over-specification is a cost you didn’t choose.
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