The Hidden Benefits of Additive Manufacturing

3D Printed Fixtures and Tooling

Did you know production fixtures and tooling using 3D printing can reduce your tooling fabrication costs as much as 50-90% by reducing labor and speeding up your products’ delivery times?

That’s just one of the many benefits of including 3D printing in your manufacturing production, according to 3D printing solutions company Stratasys. By taking a creative approach to additive manufacturing that goes beyond rapid prototyping for engineering purposes, we are able to uncover plenty of great opportunities to utilize 3D printing on the production floor to deliver quality finished products.

For ControlTek, that often means using the technology to create production tools and test fixtures, which previously required outsourcing that could extend production times. By moving the creation of these fixtures in-house, we can now complete product testing more quickly, saving significant production time and costs. These savings are then passed to ControlTek’s contract manufacturing customers.

Tools and fixtures which used to take days or sometimes weeks to build now require just a few hours at ControlTek’s Vancouver manufacturing facility.

Complementary 3D Uses

These benefits are the perfect complement to more traditional uses of 3d printing, including the engineering prototypes that are used to test out product designs and verify they are optimized for manufacturing.

Have questions about how ControlTek can put our 3D printing capabilities to work for your products? Contact us today to learn more!