Crossbar & Chassis Jig Design Review [MSXV]

How to create a jig, first-time review:

1. Initially highlight what your jig needs to accomplish and what constraints it’s bounded by. Additionally, if your jig is going to be used as a welding jig consider the proximity of the tack relative to your part depending on the material.

2. When formulating ideas consider the following as priorities to check off:

• Is my part going to be: effective, cost-efficient, and practical to assemble?

  • The effectiveness of the jig I designed had to be reconsidered multiple times along with much help from senior members to be locked.

  • I used leftover MDF fiberboard and 3D-printed parts which were quite cheap.

  • Assembly was an oversight on my part. Ensure you consider that your jig has to actually be put together in real life so some angles that are difficult to reach with an Allen-key can become frustrating.

3. When it comes to designing your part in SOLIDWORKS you should have a good idea /+ some drawings of what you’re going to design beforehand. This streamlines your process and allows you to focus on design.

• In this step if you haven’t already it might be useful to learn the basic SOLIDWORKS tools and processes by practicing on simple parts.

  • Tutorial: Creating a Part

4. At some point you’ll most likely run into a wall and be unable to figure out how to define your part / get rebuild errors. Be friendly to your leads and senior members and they’ll be able to point you in the right direction.

• Obviously be mindful that they also have their hands full with tasks most of the time.

5. Once you feel happy with your design ask a CAD-GOD to review your part and confirm its legitimacy, most likely there will be some logic or CAD errors to smooth out and you can spend a few hours correcting your poorly defined m6 holes.

6. After repeating step 5 a few times you should be good to go (probably). You can now splice all of your 3D-printed part and save your laser cut parts as DWG and DXF files.

• 3D Printing in 4 Basic Steps + Common Issues

• Vector Files + WATiMake Laser Cutting

7. After creating your parts quality check them and ensure they are within tolerance. Assemble onto wherever they are required. At this stage your part may fail due to a few reasons, here was mine:

• Firstly the spacer was too long, after checking the CAD the spacer was found to have been extruded slightly into the MDF. (even though I extruded to surface? (I still don’t understand how this happened))

• Then the second time we realized that our MDF was 1/4 in when we had CADed for 1/8 in which at first doesn’t seem like much of an issue since the angle created by this was a mere 0.5 degrees. However the space created by this meant the board did not lay flush to steel tube which was crucial to the design.

8. Your part has now passed all the necessary steps, make sure to double check and confirm with a senior member.