Walk into any modern Australian assembly facility, from automotive aftermarket and defence integrators to electronics assembly and custom fabrication, and look at the workstations. The jigs, gauges and fixtures supporting the work increasingly share a look: matte grey, sometimes brightly coloured, with that distinctive printed-layer texture. The toolroom has been quietly absorbed by the additive manufacturing department, and the change has happened in less than a decade.
Why does additive win for tooling?
Jigs and fixtures share a profile that is almost custom-designed for AM: low quantities (often one), highly geometry-specific (built for one part or one operation), short useful life (the next product revision will need a new jig anyway), and dimensional tolerances that are tight in a few key places but loose everywhere else. Traditional toolroom routes through CNC-machined aluminium or fabricated steel work fine for these requirements, but they cost orders of magnitude more and take orders of magnitude longer. AM collapses both on the dimensions that matter.
Which materials earn toolroom trust?
Glass-fibre nylon (PA-GF) is the workhorse, supplied through OzFDM when traceability matters. It is stiff, dimensionally stable, holds a thread, and survives daily workshop abuse without complaint. Carbon-fibre nylon (PA-CF) is the upgrade for stiffness-critical applications, particularly gauges and inspection fixtures where any deflection under hand pressure matters. PETG-CF is the budget option for less demanding work, and ABS or PLA make occasional appearances for one-day jigs that will not be reused.
PA-GF: the all-purpose toolroom filament
PA-CF: stiffness-critical jigs and gauges
PETG-CF: short-life production aids
TPU: soft-jaw inserts and protective pads
ESD-PETG: electronics assembly fixtures
Should we be designing modular jig systems?
Yes, almost always. The most efficient toolrooms have moved away from one-off designs toward modular jig systems: a baseplate with a regular hole pattern, locating pins, vee-blocks, clamping fingers and toe clamps that can be combined to support a wide variety of parts. Most of these elements are now printed in-house. The approach pays for itself the second time you build a jig, because the structural elements are reused and only the part-specific contact surfaces need to be printed for each new application.
Modular systems also reduce the cognitive load on operators. When every jig presents the same clamping interface, training time drops and changeover errors become rare. That is a quieter productivity gain than raw cycle time, but over a year it compounds.
Quick tip
Standardise on one baseplate hole pattern across the workshop before you print your fiftieth one-off jig. Retrofit pain is real.
What about inspection fixtures and gauges?
Beyond hold-and-locate jigs, AM has taken over inspection fixturing. Go/no-go gauges, profile templates, datum locators and CMM workholding all benefit from the same design freedoms. The catch is calibrated print processes that hit dimensional targets reliably, which is exactly what separates industrial AM from desktop work. See our portfoliofor representative examples, or read more about our FDM service for shop-floor tooling. Standardised inspection fixtures also make handover between operators almost frictionless during shift changes.
We typically recommend printing a witness coupon alongside any gauge that controls a critical dimension, and storing it with the calibration paperwork. If the gauge drifts, the coupon gives you a defensible reference point during the next audit.