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Modular fixture - A new era in manufacturing

(This article is an excerpt from a Technical Paper by Puneet Khanna, Neeraj Rao and Bhishman Desai. It won 2nd

prize at SANKALP an inter Fr. C Rodrigues Institutes Technical Paper competition organized by CRIT, Vashi)

Everyone must have played with lego blocks when they were kids. There was another game from

Funskool, Mechanics where you were given some standard parts & had to make things by tightening

nuts & bolts. Well, this article is not about advertising Funskool or Lego.

The main protagonist of this topic has a very diabolical resemblance to these games. The games

provided entertainment, while the modular fixtures discussed here are for the big boys of manufacturing

engineering.

Every Production Engineer knows what a fixture is, if you dont lets brush up your basics. A

Fixture is a device converting standard machine tools into specialized ones. It locates clamps and

supports the work pieces during machining. To make such specialized devices normally different parts

are welded together or the whole fixture body is made as a single cast.

In the production arena, there are hundreds of different types of components to be machined.

Making dedicated fixtures can be cumbersome & a costly affair. These tools produced cannot

accommodate same design components with some dimensional variations; an entirely new fixture needs

to be designed for the smallest change.

Modular fixture is the answer to these problems. Today is the world of customization. Laptops,

cars even shoes can be customized according to your needs. Modular fixture is customizable fixture for

your needs. There are different parts involved in its design.

The basic part is the tooling plate, which has grid-like pattern on which other parts are bolted.

The distance between the holes is .0008". These holes are step holes which have high precision bushes

on the top & threaded holes at the bottom. Standard parts like the support pin, support blocks, clamps etc

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are then bolted to these holes. A kit contains all these parts of different dimensions. Modular Fixture

Kits are available where such different components are grouped into categories according to their

design. Needless to say a company can order a customized kit. Modular fixtures are used in many

applications like welding, piping, machining etc.

Technical paper dealt with a case study on a connecting rod and a change in dimensionintroduced in between production cycle. It explained how modular fixture accommodated dimensional

changes without much effort from the tool design department. It was inferred how Modular fixtures

reduced setup time to half, without compromising on high level accuracy, and providing with great

flexibility.