3D Printing for Manufacturing & Factory Tooling

The problem you are actually solving

A jig is a quantity of one, shaped entirely by your specific product. That's the worst possible economics for machining. You pay setup, programming and machine time to produce a single item, and it takes a week.

So most workshops don't make the jig. The operator carries on doing it by hand, the operation stays slow, and the defect rate stays where it's.

The other half of the problem is that the first version of a fixture is never right. The operator will tell you the clamp is in the way. In a machined workflow that complaint gets absorbed because a revision costs another week.

Materials that suit this work

• PETG

  PETG

  The workhorse for bench fixtures. Tough, cheap, forgiving.

• PA-C

  PA-CF

  High clamping force, repeated cycling, or near heat sources to 120 °C.

• TPU

  TPU 95A

  Gripping surfaces that must not mark the workpiece.

• ASA

  ASA

  Fixtures used in a yard or anywhere with sun exposure.

Not sure which applies to your part? Use the material selector , four questions and it tells you, with the reasoning.

The questions manufacturing & factory tooling customers actually ask

• Is a plastic fixture accurate enough?

  For holding, cradling and guiding, yes. We hold ±0.20 mm or ±0.3%. For a precision gauge checking a ±0.05 mm tolerance, no, and we'll tell you so. The right answer there's to print the fixture body and machine or press-fit the critical features, which is still far cheaper than machining the whole thing.

• How long will it last on a production line?

  Depends entirely on wear points. Plastic against a drill bit lasts hours; plastic with a pressed-in steel bushing lasts thousands of cycles. Design the metal in at the contact points and the fixture lasts years. And because a replacement costs a few hundred rupees, reprinting annually is often the right maintenance policy.

• What if the first version is wrong?

  It will be, and that's fine. Print version one in PLA at draft finish for a few hundred rupees, hand it to the operator, and watch. Version two costs the same again. That loop is the entire advantage over machined tooling.