Tool Maker Job Description

A Tool Maker builds the equipment that sits between a part drawing and a finished part. On a production floor that means drill jigs that put every hole in the same place, weld fixtures that hold a bracket square while it cools, assembly fixtures, go and no-go gauges, and cutting tools ground to a profile no catalog sells. When a production line needs a device that does not exist yet, the request lands in the toolroom.

O*NET describes the occupation this title belongs to as workers who analyze specifications, lay out metal stock, set up and operate machine tools, and fit and assemble parts to make and repair dies, cutting tools, jigs, fixtures, gauges, and machinists' hand tools. Its sample of reported titles includes Tool Maker alongside Jig and Fixture Repairer and Tool and Fixture Specialist. The federal government's description is older but specific. The Office of Personnel Management's job grading standard for Toolmaking, 3416, dated April 1971, covers the fabrication, calibration, reconditioning and repair of machine tools, jigs, fixtures, dies, punches and gages, and says positions graded under it are to be titled Toolmaker. At its grade 11 level, toolmakers fabricate, overhaul and repair standard cutting tools such as drills, reamers, milling cutters and carbide tools, along with jigs and fixtures, drilling templates, and gages such as plug, ring, snap and caliper gages.

A typical job starts with a print, a model from a manufacturing engineer, or a production supervisor describing a problem at the machine. The Tool Maker works out where the part will locate, how it will clamp, and which surfaces have to be held to the tightest tolerance. Stock gets sawed and squared, features are roughed on a mill or lathe, critical faces are finished on a surface grinder, and hardened details may go out for heat treatment before final grinding. Bench work comes last: fitting dowel pins, setting bushings, assembling clamps, and checking the whole fixture on a surface plate before a first part is loaded.

Repair is part of the job too. A worn locating pin, a cracked clamp arm or a gauge that no longer reads true can stop a cell, and the Tool Maker is the person who finds the fault and makes the replacement detail.

The trade looks the same in a shipyard. Norfolk Naval Shipyard's Toolmaker Shop, part of its Inside Machine Shop (Shop 31), builds everything from portable cutting machines for in-place valve repairs to simple drill fixtures for extracting a single broken bolt from a flange, according to a March 2026 Navy story. Its toolmakers work on lathes, mills, grinders and electrical discharge machining equipment, in materials from plastics to specialized steels, and do their own heat treatment.

Entry. BLS says workers typically need a high school diploma or equivalent to enter an apprenticeship, and that the occupation is typically learned on the job, through apprenticeship and training programs, or through vocational schools and community and technical colleges. A practical starting point is algebra, trigonometry and blueprint reading in high school, followed by a precision machining certificate or an entry job in a machine shop that sponsors apprentices.

What the apprenticeship covers. New York's Department of Labor publishes a training outline for a general, all-round Toolmaker that shows how the hours are spread across the shop. It allots approximately 1,500 hours each to lathe work and milling machine work, 800 hours to the surface grinder, 1,000 hours to general toolmaking, which includes layout, bench work and making jigs and fixtures, and 2,500 hours to advanced toolmaking across all aspects of the trade. In other words, the outline gives the lathe and the mill more hours apiece than the general toolmaking block where jigs and fixtures are taught.

Skills that matter at the bench.

• Reading drawings and 3D models, including geometric dimensioning and tolerancing callouts for position, flatness and perpendicularity
• Setting up and running manual and CNC mills, lathes and surface grinders, with work offsets and tool length compensation on the CNC side
• Measuring with micrometers, height gauges, gauge blocks, pin gauges and, where the shop has one, a coordinate measuring machine
• Choosing tool steels and heat treatment for wear surfaces, and knowing when a detail should be hardened, ground or left soft
• Fixture design basics: locating on datums, clamping against locators, and keeping chips and coolant away from locating surfaces

Experience. As a rough guide, plan on four years of apprenticeship before working as a journey-level tool maker, and several more before taking on fixture design or leading a toolroom. The federal standard sets a high bar at its upper grade: OPM says grade 13 toolmakers apply knowledge of a wide variety of machine shop procedures and techniques and shop math.

Credentials. A registered apprenticeship ends with a certificate of completion issued by the registration agency, which is the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Apprenticeship or a recognized state apprenticeship agency. Machining credentials from the National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS) let a worker document skills on specific machines. BLS describes certification as optional for the occupation.

Software. Expect to open customer CAD models, and in a shop that programs its own CNC work, to learn a CAM package well enough to write and edit fixture-plate programs.

The projection is a decline. BLS projects employment of tool and die makers, the occupation that includes tool makers, to fall from 56,700 in 2025 to 51,500 in 2035, a drop of 9 percent or 5,200 jobs. The agency attributes the decline to automation, including CNC machine tools, reducing demand for certain tasks these workers do. That is a statement about the occupation as a whole; BLS does not project jig, fixture and gauge work separately.

Openings still come up. O*NET lists about 4,300 projected openings a year on average for the occupation over 2025 to 2035. For machinists and tool and die makers combined, BLS says all projected openings are expected to come from replacing workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire. Those yearly openings, not the net change, are the figure to weigh when deciding on an apprenticeship.

Pay varies by industry. BLS industry tables for May 2025 show a median of $78,450 for tool and die makers in medical equipment and supplies manufacturing and $61,910 in metalworking machinery manufacturing. Both are figures for the whole tool and die maker occupation within each industry, not for jig and fixture specialists alone; BLS does not report tool makers separately.

One shipyard toolroom. Norfolk Naval Shipyard's Toolmaker Shop shows the work at the point where off-the-shelf equipment runs out. A March 2026 Navy story describes a spring compression tool for removing rod spring assemblies on a submarine's lookout and bridge fairing cover doors that took ten days of design work and approximately 70 hours of precision machining, and was then included in the official Virginia-class tooling. The same shop spent 18 months designing and building a suite of portable drilling, reaming and boring tools for a submarine's bow plane cylinders and guide rails, and the tooling was later loaned to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard for the same repair on another Virginia-class boat. Projects like these depend on people who can design a device, machine it, and stand behind it on the job site.

Where tool makers work. BLS lists transportation equipment manufacturing as the largest employer of tool and die makers in 2025, with 25 percent of jobs, followed by machinery manufacturing at 23 percent and fabricated metal product manufacturing at 20 percent.

Career paths. Experienced tool makers move into toolroom lead or supervisor roles, fixture and gauge design, tool engineering, CNC programming, quality and metrology roles, or manufacturing engineering. Some open their own job shops building fixtures and gauges for local manufacturers. The combination that carries across all of these is the one the apprenticeship builds: machine skill, bench judgment, and a clear understanding of how a part sits in a fixture.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the Tool Maker opening in your toolroom. I completed a four-year registered apprenticeship at a contract manufacturer that machines and assembles hydraulic valve bodies, and for the past three years I have worked there as a journey-level tool maker supporting two machining cells and a weld department.

Most of my work is fixturing. I build drill jigs for cross-drilled ports, hydraulic workholding for our horizontal machining centers, and weld fixtures for bracket assemblies. I rough on our manual mills and lathe, finish locating surfaces on the surface grinder, and program simple CNC work for fixture plates myself. When a fixture leaves the bench, I stay with it through first-article inspection so I can see how the part actually sits and how the operator loads it.

One project I am proud of started with a complaint about hole position drifting on a valve body over a shift. The fixture had been shimmed twice. I pulled it, found a locating pin that had worn oval and a clamp pushing the part off its datum, then remade the pin in hardened tool steel and moved the clamp so it pushed toward the locator instead of across it. The problem stopped, and I wrote up the change so the second-shift lead could check the pin at each tool change.

I also keep our gauge crib in order: plug and thread gauges, height gauges and the bench micrometers, with calibration dates tracked in our system.

I am looking for a toolroom with more gauge work and more aluminum fixturing, and your customer list suggests both. I would welcome a chance to walk through some of my fixtures with your toolroom supervisor.

Sincerely, Jordan Reyes