Technology merger

The company worked in partnership with HK3D to produce the fixtures, which are being used for an OEM in the aerospace industry. The fixture was needed to hold the components in the most effective orientation for the CMM. It needed to deliver repeatable precision loading and ease of use.

Usually a fixture could only be manufactured once the components have already been machined. This process typically took two weeks. JJ Churchill worked with HK3D to design and deliver a working fixture in three days. Traditionally the fixture would have been manufactured by machining from a block of metal. The new process not only save timed but also reduced costs by half, with much less waste.

Conventional manufacturing prove-out processes follow a linear path: write the CMM programme; wait for components to be machined; prove-out CMM programme; use the CMM programme for production. Steps two and three can be a bottleneck – which led to JJ Churchill and HK3D developing an alternative solution for fixturing.

Karan Singh, one of JJ Churchill’s manufacturing engineers and the lead in additive manufacturing, said: “The benefits of bringing 3D printing into traditional manufacturing process are huge. In this project, not only did we achieve significant savings in time and money, but our knowledge and capability has rocketed.

“It made us analyse a problem in different ways and pushed our way of thinking; it’s a great example of additive and traditional manufacturing working in synergy to deliver significant savings in time and money.”

Managing director Andrew Churchill added: “This is another example of JJ Churchill applying emerging technologies to component manufacturing and inspection techniques. The adoption of 3D printing and its application to the way we engineer products, fundamentally increases our agility as a business to meet our customers’ new product Introduction timescales, whilst at the time reducing the cost of tooling.”

Tom Smith, sales manager of HK3D, commented: “By investing time into this project, JJ Churchill have worked closely with our team of application engineers to fully optimise our range of additive technologies. As a result, they have really started to unlock the true benefits of additive manufacturing.”

JJ Churchill www.jjchurchill.com

HK3D www.hkh3d.com