Practicing What It Produces

While the folks at Stratasys certainly promote their fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology as being beneficial to manufacturers, it turns out that they not only talk about it, but use it.  One of its engineers realized that there was a malfunction of one of their test fixtures, and so she was able to create a new fixture within 24 hours using FDM technology—weeks faster than conventional machining and fabrication.

“Direct digital manufacturing eliminates all the time-consuming steps in fixture making—documenting, quoting, tool-path design, machining and assembly,” said Paul Sollie, Stratasys Director of Manufacturing. “Without the additive fabrication machines, we had two- to six-week lead times for fixtures.While waiting for them, we had to put Band-Aids on the problem. Now our team is putting new fixtures in service in just one day.”

This particular faulty-fixture was in Stratasys’ materials production lab; it was used to test the pull force required to withdraw plastic filament from the canister and feed into the extrusion mechanism of its additive fabrication machines. The radius of a material transport wheel was too small, which was throwing off the readings. The engineer was able to draw up a new transport wheel design in CAD and manufacture the complex portion on an FDM machine to save time, while the less-complicated portion was machined. Within 24 hours, the problem was solved, and the test fixture was giving accurate readings.