Here’s the whole soldering jig for the big Studio1Thousand project, finally!

Sometimes it seems easier to just cobble things together, or do things the shady way. When it gets to the point where you have to do something over and over, thousands of times, you have to make fixtures or jigs to help you get it done. It’s not only important to help you do the work more quickly, but also to help ensure that errors are reduced to an acceptable level. You really don’t want to get 1,000 pieces into a manufacturing run, only to find out that one person has been doing their work in a slightly different way than everyone else…

Again, can’t exactly tell you what these are for yet, but we will definitely post up some photos when the project is public!

Here’s the full-size version of that powder coating fixture we built for a large project with Studio1Thousand. 1,800 of these little brass tubes get coated with a Tiger Coatings series 44 flat black matte powder, while the ends remain bare for soldering. Coating this many tubes is time consuming no matter how you do it, but the alternative to this fixture is to manually wrap each end of each tube with the appropriate width of high-temp masking tape…that is a soul-crushing job that I would wish on no one.