Tooling comes in many shapes and sizes. Whether you need a jig, fixture, or end-of-arm tool, you simply want a tool that gets the job done quickly and efficiently. No business can afford to get bogged down on tooling design and sourcing, so here’s how you can use additive manufacturing to your advantage – to make the tool you need fast and get back to value-added work.
Tooling Challenges
Traditional tooling production comes with several challenges:
- Expensive – One-off tools can quickly become expensive to design and manufacture, especially if they are somewhat complex in shape, design, or function.
- Slow – Whether making the tool in-house or outsourcing to a job shop, lead time can often hold up production.
- Design constraints – There are physical limitations on the complexity of the parts that you can machine, limiting your ability to optimize for the task or the operator using it.
- Ever-growing inventory – When jigs and fixtures are only used sporadically, it can be cumbersome to store and inventory each one.
- Lack of skilled workers – It’s becoming harder and harder to find workers skilled in traditional tooling methods like CNC milling. Their time is better devoted to value-added production, if possible.
Let’s examine each challenge in more detail, including how additive manufacturing can solve it (with real-world examples).
Read the article in full here.
