JIGS AND INSPEX FIXTURES
3D PRINTING IN THE FASTLANE WORDS: Sam Davies
6 SHOWN:
3D PRINTED JIG USED TO ACCURATELY POSITION FASTLINE BRANDING ON GLASS WING BARRIER
T
he businesspeople of big city corporates and the students at public universities often start their day in the same way, passing through a revolving door, a polite hello to those in reception, touching an ID card to an electronic reader and walking on through the glass wing barriers marked by the Fastlane Turnstiles brand to the rest of their day. How the branding of Fastlane made it onto the glass walls that help the likes of Facebook, Dell, Google, Manchester University and 7 World Trade Center keep their buildings secure has typically been no easy process. It was done by hand and by sight and if the positioning of the logo wasn’t done correctly it would have to be removed and re-positioned on the glass wing. This was a difficult task to carry out repeatedly, time-consuming and occasionally stressful, and then 3D printing came along. The manufacturer of pedestrian entrance control systems first adopted the technology in 2018, after meeting UK reseller CREAT3D at an additive manufacturing trade show, in the form of a Mark Two machine. This platform, developed by Markforged, reinforces its Onyx material with carbon fibre, fibreglass and Kevlar, and was acquired
by Fastlane to streamline its R&D efforts, designing parts at lower costs in less time.
“With the ease of 3D printing, we're able to create more jigs to help production.” Working with CREAT3D, some initial sample parts – one, to check the form of an R&D component, and the other, to assess the function of a manufactured component – were printed, with Fastlane said to have been impressed with the strength properties, surface finish and temperature resistance.
After these initial parts, Fastlane installed the Mark Two in its engineering department, where it was immediately leveraged to print R&D components that typically would have been outsourced and produced in metal. Printing these kinds of parts was removing two weeks of lead time out of the design process and soon Fastlane’s production and assembly team were also looking to exploit the machine’s capabilities. From here, Fastlane’s application of 3D printing has snowballed, per CREAT3D’s Sabina Gonzalez-George and Simon Chandler.
IN POSITION
Often cited as additive manufacturing’s ‘low-hanging fruit’, production aids not only represented a quick win for Fastlane, with cost and time reductions achieved against traditionally manufactured jigs and fixtures but, by 3D printing a jig with a ‘locating edge’ to fit the exact geometry of the glass door, also solved the problem of positioning the company’s logo on those glass wing barriers.
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