Serving customers across aerospace, military, medical, and other industrial sectors, VIRTEX needed to create large volumes of custom fixtures for circuit boards and electronics placed in plastic enclosures. The fixtures were machined using traditional methods, but the lead time and cost would be unsustainable as production scaled. VIRTEX needed a 3D printing solution that could deliver the speed and agility to meet the demand for 3,000 fixtures per month and a build volume to accommodate 18″ x 6″ parts.

VIRTEX worked with Essentium to explore the possibilities of deploying AM to create these custom fixtures that could perform as well as the machined counterparts. Using the Essentium High Speed Extrusion (HSE) 3D Printing Platform and Essentium PCTG material, VIRTEX could print the set of fixtures in under two days, reducing the lead time by almost two weeks. For the same fixture order that cost $5,000, the 3D printed part was $30, reducing the cost by 99%.

Said Ian Denefe, Manufacturing Engineer at VIRTEX: “The flexibility of additive manufacturing was one of the biggest benefits for us. The fact that we could reverse engineer existing fixtures, print them quickly, and rapidly modify them or replace them made it an ideal solution.”

Essentium
www.essentium.com