Investigation of wear behaviour of FDM fixtures

In the industrial field, the fabrication of custom fixtures was historically one of the first applications of Rapid Prototyping technologies for end-product manufacturing. The advantage of using additive manufacturing custom fixtures is well assessed in literature in terms of production times and costs, whereas little attention was given to the life time and wear behaviour of additive manufacturing fixtures. A specific apparatus was designed for a novel wear test, whose results provide information about the durability of fixtures fabricated by fused deposition modelling to be used for the inspection of sheet metal parts.