This has been making a few people on Facebook irrationally mad
we had a recent balustrading job wherein the structural elements had to be finished first and rushed to galvanising so could not be used as a reference. the novel solution to avoid any fuckups was these 3D printed jigs which have locating bosses screws in. every panel is unique with many having nightmare fuel features and spanned at times three separate structural elements allowing little room for error. the site is a brutalist building on a hill with crane access only.
In the modelling we could a interesting and counterintuitive phenomenon, putting the panels off axis to better fit the table randomized the distance from hole centres to the faces of the part and every member had at least 3 or more holes that landed on a whole 1mm increment (this also applies to 1/16" incrementals on imperial tables)
the local supplier I use here in Australia KO welding tables did not want to make anything similar to Jasons incremental tooth system as he felt even something similar would be encroaching on fireball IP but wanted an absolute incremental system that would not yield tto heat expansion so came up with a “seashell” incremental design, I get on very well with the owner of KO and despite being a competitor is a great fan of Jason and actually recommends Jason’s products regularly for the guys that do a lot of mobile work and even recommends the tables for those doing primarily imperial fabrication. using these absolute incremental seashells and picking specific hole locations we have been able to approximate angles with less than 1 minute. and largely replace the 3D prints.
I’ll also note that to avoid distortion on these panels I’ve been having my wife work in gang fashion behind me with a needle scaler on each joint as they cool to peen the welds relaxing the material back out to avoid the shrinkage. its surprisingly fast (but noisy) and keeps these thin frames remarkably straight. ideally I’d like to transition over to laser welding eventually for this kind of work but until then its an effective technique that allows you to run hot enough that the splatter with negligible without fear of warp
