amount of uncertainty involved with how much time and expense it will take to create fixtures (or complete a project without fixtures), ultimately making the quoted cost lower and more competitive. Fabricators can also download CAD files of the modular fixtures to design everything on a computer. This is especially useful when creating some custom fixtures to interface with the modular components. This hybrid strategy gives designers a lot of flexibility when designing fixtures and allows them to adjust and reuse parts in situations that previously would have required new fixtures or extra machining to adapt to changes in parts and design. This means designers can design and create custom fixtures in hours or days rather than weeks with the traditional custom-machined fixtures. Increased Productivity on the Shop Floor Having good fixtures reduces operator error by ensuring parts are located correctly and clamped to prevent distortion of critical dimensions. Most welders know this but don’t practice it due to time constraints or shortage of workers with the skill set to create them. If you have an easy-to-use, modular system, you are more likely to create a fixture, and that system will pay off through less rework and scrap. Less Storage Space Required Modular fixtures are designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly. They take up much less space when stored than a dedicated fixture. Users who opt to create custom fixture plates or blocks for use with modular fixtures will still realize drastic space savings when compared to traditional fixtures. Real World Examples Strong Hand Tools® donated materials to a design project that aimed to create a fixture for a solar car chassis to be used by a university in the American Solar Challenge. Tyler Smutz, Killstress Design, Anaheim, Calif., donated his skills to the project and designed the chassis and fixtures in CAD using modular fixture models available for download. The designer took advantage of the holes and right-angle brackets as reference points to design fixtures that mate with the system holes — Fig. 2. An interesting feature the designer added was to incorporate toggle clamp mounts into the design of the fixture plates — Fig. 3. The slots and tabs are cut by a laser and later bent and tack welded by hand. This creates a setup suitable for even high production runs, although, in this case, we only created one final part. This type of item can also be held JUNE 2016 / WELDING JOURNAL 79 Fig. 2 — A solar car chassis held in place by modular fixtures and custom fixture plates. (Drawing by Tyler Smutz, Killstress Designs.) Fig. 3 — Closeup detail of a custom fixture plate showing toggle clamp mount and holes that interface with modular fixtures. ((Drawing by Tyler Smutz, Killstress Designs.)
Welding Journal | June 2016
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