3D-Printed Automotive Assembly Jig Cuts Weight and Improves Accuracy
Jigs used to assemble automotive parts can be difficult to maintain, and because they're made of metal, they are heavy – up to 150 pounds. Engineers at Solaxis Ingenious Manufacturing in Bromont, Canada, have now used Fortus 3D Printers from Stratasys to manufacture a jig for an automotive supplier, which uses it to assemble high-volume plastic door seals. The company designed and manufactured a jig for an automotive supplier, which uses it to assemble high-volume plastic door seals. After developing several iterations of the jig, Solaxis produced a 3D-printed jig that is over 100 pounds lighter than a typical jig for this application, and slashed the design and manufacturing time by at least two thirds compared with traditional methods.
Transcript
00:00:04 [Music] this is an automotive assembly jig it's designed to help the operator quickly and efficiently assemble all the products coming off of press [Music] my name is fr Gilbo I'm the owner president of salais and we're located in bro Quebec we use 3 printing everywhere cuz it's our core business especially
00:00:41 for specialized tooling and then functional [Music] Parts they had targeted solution they wanted to make sure all their operators could lift the desktop jig uh by themselves Dory printing really help us speed up everything normally they get these jigs that are traditionally made in other types of Machining 16 20 weeks
00:01:07 we managed to do all this with stris 3D printing then 3 to 5 weeks everything was to speed up production we brought the buttons closer to the operator we bought the clips closer to the operator it was really optimized on every version of subsequent projects the benefit for our customers of having jig redesigned and modified helped us to uh reduce their cycle Time by 4 second per cycle
00:01:33 knowing that they're doing almost 250,000 part per year also uh the fact of having a plastic jigs instead of metal jig allows them to reduce the the weight of the jig so it's very lightweight only about 28 lb trist Street printers are mostly unique because of the the fact of having thermoplastics so extruded plastic allows us to have really uh Stronger
00:01:57 Parts you don't need to think about the tooling you're really free to create however you want the par we started with one stris 3D printing system and now because of theand we're up to five in the automotive industry 3D printing is really moving from prototyping to manufacturing applications it's really in supporting tier 2 or tier three U manufacturers that are supplying
00:02:20 automotive industry large oems get all their product out there faster