Official Luthiers Forum!

We were having a debate in the shop, and I'm interested in what other people think of this.

What are the official differences between jigs, fixtures, guides, and templates? It seems like they overlap quite a bit, but I'm sure there are actual rules.

Opinions, please!

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This was recently discussed here in the forum. I think that it came down to a fixture being job specific and unchanging and a jig being an aid that is more versitile. I could be completely wrong on this. The forum has a search feature that sometimes helps with finding old threads. I say just call everything a shop-aide.

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Fixture is an item that holds a part to aid in the performance of an process. Fixtures may or may not include guides or templates as attachable or perninate parts of said fixture.

Guides are items used to guide a tool. a guide can be considered a template or a template can be considered a guide of sorts

Templates are items use to aid accuratly and repeditivly location of processes.

This is in the manufacturing engineering world the basic definition.

If you are really having this debate in your shop; questioning if an item is a fixture, template or guide; then you really need to be building a lot more "tooling" (a word that describes all the above) and debaiting far less