Manufacturing Consulting: Fixturing, Setup Time, and Lean Process
Fixturing, workholding, and setup time reduction, advised by the people who actually run the machines.
- Typical lead time
- 2–10 business days
- Minimum order
- 1 piece
- Plant location
- Troy, MI
- Files accepted
- STEP · IGES · DWG · PDF
Most of what makes a job expensive isn't the cutting. It's the setup: how the part gets held, how many operations it takes, and how long a machine sits idle between them. That's the work we consult on, whether the parts run on our floor or yours.
The most common engagement is a design-for-manufacturability review. Send a model and we'll tell you what's expensive to machine and why: an internal radius that forces a smaller tool and triples the cycle time, a tolerance tighter than the function actually needs, a feature that can only be reached in a second setup. Changing those things early usually costs nothing. Changing them after a fixture is built is a different conversation.
Fixturing and workholding is the other half of it. Soft jaws, custom plates, trunnion setups, and tombstones all exist to cut the number of times a part gets handled. We design and build fixtures for our own production, and we do the same for shops bringing an operation in-house.
Setup time reduction and lean process work is where we've spent the most effort on our own floor, and it's what we bring to an engagement. Standardized tooling libraries, pre-set holders, staged material, and documented setups pull real hours out of a changeover. On a fifty-piece run, that gap is often the difference between a job that pays and one that doesn't.
What we don't do is validate a critical part design. We're machinists, not a test lab. If a component needs stress analysis, fatigue testing, or certification for a safety-critical application, that work belongs with a qualified engineering firm or an accredited lab, and we'll tell you so rather than guess. Our consulting covers how a part gets made, not whether the design is right for its end use.
Typical applications
- 01Design-for-manufacturability review before a part is quoted
- 02Fixture and workholding design for repeat production
- 03Setup time reduction on parts already in production
- 04Tooling standardization across a family of parts
- 05Process and cell layout for shops bringing machining in-house
- 06Second opinion on a quote that came back higher than expected
Materials we machine on this service
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