JJ Churchill (www.jjchurchill.com), the Nuneaton-based and family-owned precision-engineering company, has used 3-D printing to reduce the time to prepare fixtures for its CMM quality inspection process by 70% — and reduced costs by 50%.

The company worked in partnership with HK3D to produce the fixtures, which are being used on a project for an OEM in the aerospace industry.

The fixtures were required to hold the components in the optimum orientation for checking on a CMM, while also offering repeatable precision, ease of loading and ease of use.

Usually a fixture could only be manufactured once the components had been machined — a process that typically took two weeks — but JJ Churchill worked with HK3D to design and deliver a working fixture in three days.

Traditionally a fixture would have been manufactured by machining it out of blocks of metal; 3-D printing not only saved time but also reduced costs — by half, and with much less waste.

Karan Singh, one of JJ Churchill’s manufacturing engineers — and the lead engineer in additive manufacturing — said: “The benefits of bringing 3-D printing into traditional manufacturing processes are huge.

“In this project, not only did we achieve significant savings in time and money, but our knowledge and capability have rocketed.

“This new process made us analyse problems in different ways and challenged our ways of thinking. It has also changed the way I think as a design engineer.”

Managing director Andrew Churchill said, “This is another example of the company applying emerging technologies to component manufacturing and inspection techniques.

“The adoption of 3-D printing and its application to the way JJ Churchill engineers products fundamentally increases our ability to meet our customers’ new-product introduction timescales, while at the time reducing the cost of tooling.”