When we look at high-production workholding there's a few different areas of concentration that we need to think about. Obviously, robust and easy loading is one of the largest concerns that I see; it's probably one of the most overlooked areas of fixturing, especially during design. It's not often that the fixture designer is as aware as he should be of how easy or difficult it is to load a fixture, but that is certainly a consideration that needs to be incorporated into the fixture design; it is not something that needs to be looked at once the fixture's built and on the floor. With the use of load guides, rough load guides, especially those that are easily adjustable from a fixture design standpoint so that the operator can get the feel of loading that part correctly; the idea here is that you want that part to get where it needs to be 100 percent of the time. It also needs to be robust. We know that from experience that loading parts is very rough on a fixture; there's a lot of bumping and banging and mistakes made putting parts in upside down, things of that nature. So anything that's in the area of the part, anything on the fixture itself really needs to be strong and robust and beefed up, so don't spare the, don't spare the steel. Steel's relatively cheap still, so just go ahead and pile it on there where you can.

Repeatable locating is also a key consideration when looking at high-production workholding. Repeatable locating means that the part when loaded will go to the same spot again and again and again, ensuring that you'll have the maximum efficiency rate on the machine, your operators are going to be able to load a part one time and one time only, that they're not going to have to fidget and fuss to get it where it needs to be.

Repeatable clamping force with hydraulics is something that we like to accommodate for that because the hydraulic pressure's always the same, therefore your clamping forces are as repeatable. We all know that when you clamp a part it does influence the part; it increases or induces dynamics into the part, so we want make sure that that is repeatable so that if we have to accommodate for that movement from the clamping forces or a distortion that is repeatable and once we accommodate for it that it remains that way.

The ability to accommodate different part numbers and fixtures, obviously as we're all aware about there in the market today there is two or three different styles of a single part that have to be run across the same fixture. So using creativity to accommodate those different parts, multiple clamp locations, perhaps you're having a set of clamps on a fixture that works for a V-6 part and a different set of clamps on the fixture that worked for a V-8 part, these types of things all need to be considered for high-production workholding as well. Then obviously, using creativity increases the utilization of a machine. We'll show some examples of that; you just saw one from the rotating fixture, and then we will also show some more examples of that here in the next few slides.