For production and manufacturing engineers
Does the fixture pay for itself?
Nobody approves tooling on price, they approve it on payback period. Put in the seconds an operator loses and the scrap you are living with, and this gives you the number your finance department will ask for.
Your operation
Payback period
10 days
The fixture costs ₹919 and saves ₹2,917 a month. After that it is profit.
Where the saving comes from
- Operator time saved2.8 hours a month
- ₹417
- Scrap avoided12.5 units a month
- ₹2,500
- Total, per month
- ₹2,917
- Net, first year
- ₹34,081
- Net, three years
- ₹1,04,081
Straight arithmetic, no discounting and no allowance for the fixture wearing out. In practice a bench fixture with steel bushings at the wear points lasts years, and a replacement costs the same few hundred rupees as the original.
Worth being honest about
The first version of a fixture is usually wrong. The operator will tell you the clamp is in the way. Budget for two: print version one in PLA at draft finish for a few hundred rupees, watch someone use it, then make the real one. That loop is the entire advantage over machined tooling, and it barely moves the numbers above.
How we build factory toolingHow to fill this in without fooling yourself
Time the operation, do not guess it. Stand at the bench with a phone and time ten units. The figure people guess is almost always the time the task takes when it goes well, which is not the average. The hunting, re-checking and occasional redo is where the seconds actually go.
Scrap is usually the bigger number. Most people fill in the time saving carefully and leave the defect rate alone, then find the fixture paid for itself on scrap in the first fortnight. If an operation has a defect rate you can name, put it in. If parts get reworked rather than binned, the cost of a defect is the rework labour, not the material.
Use a fully loaded labour rate. Not the wage. The wage plus the overhead that wage carries, which in most plants is somewhere between 1.4 and 2 times the basic. ₹150 an hour is a reasonable default for a MIDC operator; use your own figure if finance has one.
Ignore the fixture wearing out. The calculator does. A bench fixture with steel bushings pressed in at the wear points lasts years, and when it finally goes, a reprint from the same file costs the same few hundred rupees. That is the part machined tooling cannot match.
What if the fixture needs to be accurate?
We hold ±0.20 mm, which is fine for holding, cradling and guiding but not for a gauge checking a ±0.05 mm tolerance. Where one feature has to be tighter than that, we print the fixture body and press in a steel bush or ream the hole to size. That is still a fraction of the cost of machining the whole thing, and it is covered on the factory tooling page.
You have the file. Get the price in 30 seconds.
Drop in an STL and the estimator measures it in your browser, no upload, no account, no sales call before you see a number.