Stratasys and nTopology has announced that the two companies are working on a joint project to make the design of jigs, fixtures and other manufacturing supportive parts easier when using nTopology’s nTop Platform.
This will take the form of a customisable set of tools which will include a new FDM Assembly Fixture Generator inside nTop Platform.
If you’re not familiar with nTop Platform, its field driven approach makes it ideal for this sort of work as it’s possible to take a set of best practices and very quickly ‘bake’ them into prepackaged templates and workflows that can be reused and shared – you can read our review here.
This is the first time that we’ve seen nTopology release workflows in collaboration with an external vendor, but considering the level of cooperation we’ve seen in the additive world recently, we suspect this won’t be the last.
Jigs and fixtures have always been a sweet spot for additive manufacturing – particularly given the quick turnaround (compared to other production methods), particularly in larger organisations where the timescale for running such parts through the machine shop add delays into production preparation projects.
The press release states “The FDM Assembly Fixture Generator, which is the first of several planned DfAM workflows, is designed to improve efficiency and increase productivity on the factory floor.
The FDM Assembly Fixture Generator automates the design of jigs and fixtures and enables engineers to quickly turn a part file into a ready-to-print fixture with a simple drag-and-drop. It is available now via nTop Platform.”
“We look forward to super-charging the Stratasys additive community with nTop Platform by combining Stratasys expertise with our powerful platform, giving both of our users improved designs with faster time to manufacture,” said nTopology CEO Bradley Rothenberg .
“Manufacturing is going through the most profound shift it has seen in 100 years, and the Stratasys and nTopology collaboration brings this unique combined innovation to accelerate that shift.”
Learn more about the new generator here.
