Next session · Oct 20–22, 2026 · Grand Rapids

Three days in the room with the man who wrote the book.

Automotive Plastic Part Design is the program ETS has taught continuously for four decades to more than 19,800 engineers. Material selection, design procedures, processing and assembly, taught through the real failure cases that never made it into any other book. Bring your drawings. Bring your real problem.

Reserve my seat → Full seminar details

Reserve now, pay on invoice · $200 off per attendee for 3+ from one organization

What you’ll walk out with

Recognize the failure before the program pays for it.

Plastic-part failures take years to learn on the job: warped parts, cracked bosses, problems discovered after tooling. The seminar compresses that into three days of case histories, rules you can apply on Monday and a binder you’ll keep on the desk.

01

Material selection

Choosing resin from the service environment backwards, with the datasheet traps named.

02

Design procedures

Walls, ribs, bosses, draft and snap-fits sized for the mold and the assembly line.

03

Processing

What the mold will actually do to your geometry, and how to design around it.

04

Assembly methods

Snap-fits, fasteners, welding and adhesives chosen for the part and the volume.

Included

Everything you need to use it on Monday.

Seminar attendees can also book individual consulting sessions with the instructor, free for registered attendees, first come first served.

  • Printed slide binder. The full deck, yours to keep.
  • Take-home reference text. The method in writing, not just in memory.
  • Certificate of completion. Continuing-education credit available.
  • Free consulting session. Bring a part; get one-on-one time with the instructor.
  • ChatETS afterwards. Ask follow-ups against the same corpus, any time.

Other ways to train

Can’t make Grand Rapids? We’ll bring it to you.

Every Academy course can run as a private cohort or on-site at your plant, focused on your parts and your processes.

On-site

Custom on-site training

Tailored to your products, processes and goals, delivered at your facility.

Request information Catalog

The full Academy catalog

90 offerings across 14 tracks, from polymer failure science to EV, crash, compliance and AI enablement.

Browse courses Textbook

Designing Plastic Parts for Assembly

The 10th-edition reference every seminar is taught from.

Read the forewords

Next step

Seats are limited to keep the room a working room.

Reserve now; you’ll receive an invoice, and can pay by check, ACH, PO or card. Full refund up to 21 days before the seminar.

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