Audi Sport: Designing fixtures in minutes for 3D printing

The challenge

During production of the Audi R8 and Audi e-tron GT, Audi Sport needed to design approximately 200 new fixtures, jigs, and other tools. Traditionally, each of these items requires a skilled engineer to manually design it in CAD software, diverting valuable resources from the more challenging aspects of production.

The outcome

Audi Sport adopted fixturemate to address the design bottleneck. Using it, they cut fixture design time from 2-4 hours to 10-20 minutes, and enabled a broader group to develop and manufacture fixtures, jigs, and other tools independently. Combined with 3D printing, lead times for fixtures shrank from four weeks to just 24 hours, reducing part costs by 80%.

Location

Böllinger Höfe, Heilbronn, Germany

Industry

Automotive

Size

1500+

Product

fixturemate

Increasing design output

Using fixturemate, Audi Sport increased their fixture design output to meet production demands.

fixturemate's simple click-and-drag interface allowed easy design of features such as supports, text labels, holes for machined parts or cable routing, and clamps from a library of pre-designed parts. Creating complex features, like the negative for free-form geometry, was streamlined with fixturemate, reducing a traditionally labor-intensive CAD task to a single click.

fixturemate also integrated seamlessly with Audi Sport's 3D printing workflow, including slicing with UltiMaker Cura.

"In CAD we usually need two to four hours to produce a design, depending on the size of the part. With fixturemate we can produce a usable fixture in minutes. Because it's easy to use, we can bring in trainees and show them how to use it, so they can work directly with it to create usable fixtures in a short time."

Cem Guelaylar

Additive Manufacturing Lead, Audi Sport GmbH