Anna Lazar
Turn soft-jaw modelling from a half-hour chore into a five-second habit with Cloudnc Soft Jaw Designer in Autodesk Fusion.
When your part geometry gets tricky, designing soft jaws can feel like the longest five minutes of the job – except it never takes just five minutes!
CloudNC shop studies show that modelling, corner-relieving, and clearance-checking a pair of jaws routinely costs 30–60 minutes per set-up, time your spindle could be turning.
CloudNC Soft Jaw Designer collapses that work into a single click right inside Fusion, just pick your jaw blanks, position them around the part, and hit generate. Seconds later, you’re looking at production-ready jaws, complete with allowance and corner relief, still fully editable using Fusion CAD capabilities. No strings attached and no hidden costs – just a tool to save you time and energy.
Soft Jaw Designer value for Fusion users
- Up to 90% faster fixture design: CloudNC benchmarks show most programmers reclaim 40–50 minutes per job.
- First-clamp confidence: Automatically applied allowances stop crushed walls and chatter-inducing looseness.
- Handles any geometry: Organic surfaces, draft angles, free-form curves – Soft Jaw Designer adapts to them all.
- Keeps your workflow clean: Jaws appear on their own component, organised just as you’d have modelled them by hand.
- Ready for machining in moments: Pair Soft Jaw Designer with CAM Assist to auto-program toolpaths for both jaws and part and push straight to the machine.
How Soft Jaw Designer works
- Select your part: Import or open any Fusion body.
- Position soft-jaw blanks: Pick bodies to define the jaw blank geometry, or leave this selection blank to create the geometry directly in the Soft Jaw Designer.
- Click Generate: Beyond just a Boolean operation, the Soft Jaw Designer will ensure that bosses and other features on the part will not bind when the jaws are open and shut.
- Refine if you wish: Add chamfers, fillet, clamps, or engraving exactly as you do today.
When fixtures take minutes, you free up more time to focus on programming and other key tasks. Reliable jaws unlock the ability to accept complex, high-value parts, providing you with the confidence to take on more challenging work. Additionally, reducing the time spent on CAD grind boosts spindle utilization, allowing for more cutting hours every shift. From blank blocks to finished fixtures in less time than it takes to brew a coffee!
Try Soft Jaw Designer for free today
To use Soft Jaw Designer alongside the other great capabilities offered by CloudNC, simply download the CAM Assist plug-in, open any challenging part, and turn soft-jaw modelling from a half-hour chore into a five-second habit.
To try just the Soft Jaw Designer for free, download the Soft Jaw app directly here.
Why wrestle with sketches and booleans when you could be machining? Fire up CloudNC Soft Jaw Designer and let Fusion do the heavy lifting – so you can get back to making chips.