This paper presents the development of an engineering simulator as a validation environment for sheet metal design methods. Therefore requirements of the engineering simulator are identified, such as "the duration of the engineering simulator shall be one day" and "the solutions must be suitable for sheet metal processing on the available machine tools". This engineering simulator is divided into seven steps, which include introduction (1), ideation (2), prototyping (3), construction (4), CAD-CAM programming (5), production (6) and testing (7). The results of this work can serve as a basis for the development and improvement of other development simulators and be unsed as a validation environment for the development of disgn methods.