Drill guides, assembly fixtures, soft jaws, inspection nests — printed instead of machined, for a tenth of the cost and none of the lead time.
A machined aluminium fixture runs $300–800 and a week of someone's queue. The printed version is usually $20–80, on your bench in days. When tooling costs less than the meeting about tooling, you make more tooling — and every station gets its jig.
The part changed? Edit the CAD, re-upload, and the v2 fixture ships tomorrow. Printed tooling tracks your product instead of lagging it — and the old version cost so little that nobody has to defend it.
Printed jaws and nests hold finished surfaces without marring them — no galling, no scratches, no tape-wrapped vice jaws. For gripping painted, anodised or polished work, plastic tooling isn't the compromise; it's the upgrade.
Bushed or plain guides that put holes where the drawing says, every time, without a DRO.
Cradles and nests that hold parts in alignment while you fasten, bond or solder.
Vice and chuck jaws shaped to your part — grip the impossible without crushing it.
Repeatable seats for CMM, gauging and go/no-go checks.
Hold the angle while the adhesive cures — in materials that don't stick to the glue.
Position labels, masks and badges identically across a thousand units.
Daily abuse, clamping loads, warm workshops — the fixture that outlives the product.
About PA-CF →The default: tough, oil-tolerant, slightly forgiving in the grip. Most jigs should be PETG.
About PETG →Dead-flat and stiff for alignment and inspection tooling that lives indoors.
A pair of soft jaws in PETG (≈120 g each) lands around $28 a jaw. A small drill guide, ≈60 g in PLA-CF, is light enough that the $27.50 order minimum sets the price. An assembly cradle big enough to hold a pump housing, ≈300 g in PETG: roughly $62. All GST inclusive, tax invoice attached, reorderable from your dashboard.
If a fixture earns its keep once — one saved scrap part, one hour of fitting time — it has usually paid for itself. That's the whole pitch. Upload the model and see the number; if you only have a drawing or a sketch, email it to hello@assysts.com and we'll model the fixture with you.
Add heat-set inserts ($2.75/part, M3–M5) to any fixture that gets bolted down — printed tooling with brass threads survives the workshop year.
Upload an STL — firm price in under a minute, GST included, dispatch date shown before you pay. STEP, 3MF or just a drawing? A person quotes it within one business day.