ESD-safe fiber optic cable management for an aircraft program.

The challenge

The customer needed a cable management component for routing fiber optic lines through an aircraft. The part had to be intrinsically static-dissipative, since a coating could wear through and a charge could damage the optics it protects. It also had to carry structural load through walls only 0.030 inch thick, hold tight tolerances at every feature, and present a smooth surface so the cable jacket would not abrade. FDM could not deliver the feature resolution or finish, and at roughly 2,000 units the design was too small a run and too likely to change to justify an injection mold.

Our approach

• Selected stereolithography for the combination of fine feature resolution, smooth as-printed surface, and an ESD-safe resin that is static-dissipative through the full wall rather than at a coating.
• Ran orientation trials on the thin profile, since the way the part sits on the build platform decides whether 0.030 inch walls hold their dimensions and whether the tolerances repeat from the first unit to the two-thousandth.
• Locked the validated orientation, support strategy, and post-processing recipe into a controlled work instruction, with wash and cure profiles fixed so every lot follows the same process.
• Produced the run on our large-format SLA cell, with parts inspected against the drawing using 3D laser scanning and manual metrology.
• Completed AS9102 first article inspection and released each production phase through our digital quality workflow with timestamped sign-offs, under AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015.

The result

The customer received an initial production run of approximately 2,000 parts that met the ESD, tolerance, and surface finish requirements without secondary coating or machining. The process is now qualified for repeat production, and follow-on orders above 1,000 units are anticipated. The program is one of many that made SLA a serial production process for us rather than a prototyping tool, and it is the kind of low-to-mid volume, design-fluid work where printing beats molding on both cost and schedule.