Intent
Understand manufacturing intent
A design is useless if it cannot be made. Most of the decisions that define whether a part can be made, and what it will cost, are taken long before it is manufactured. Tolvara brings that manufacturing knowledge into the process early, for the engineers designing the part and the engineers who will make it.
What manufacturing intent is
An experienced manufacturing engineer looks at a part and sees how it will be made. Which process suits it. Which material. The order the operations will run in, how the part will be held, and which features will need care. Each of those decisions shapes how the part is made and what it costs. Most of them are made without a second thought. That judgement is what we call manufacturing intent.
Today that knowledge sits with a small number of senior people. It is applied inconsistently, rarely written down, and it leaves when they do.
Why it has not been solved
Tools that check whether a part can be made have existed for years. They are rule based, and rules only capture what someone could write down: a minimum wall thickness, a maximum depth for a hole. Intent is judgement over open ended decisions, and judgement never fitted in a rule.
What Tolvara does
Tolvara sits in the gap between design and manufacturing. It takes the standard CAD file you would already send to a manufacturer and applies manufacturing intent to it: how the part would be made, where it will be difficult, and what that does to the cost. It gives that back as feedback on the part.
For the engineer designing it, that means hearing about problems while the design is still theirs to change. For the engineer who will make it, it means seeing what a part will take before they commit to it.