Just sharing…we built these for a client, roughly around 40 units…these were the first units out of the mould, we did one in texalium, one in plain weave, one in twill, so we were still learning on how to pack the mould.
^^This was the .IGS file, we 3D scanned the original part, took the .STL and surfaced it in Geomagic, outputed it to .IGS and made it water-tight using solidworks (added some changes in size and ranging to it), then did the tooling path, produced the G-code and hit the whopper button on the CNC to make the plug we used to produce the mould.
Wohoo, killer job! It’s great to finaly see someone else uses SW for making plugs/moulds. What scanner did you use? I use the Nextengine, cheap/works great.
We have one of those, they work well but patience is needed, we have a creaform unit we use for the mainstream, we just did a 2012 X6M scan for a client who designs aero products, we will end up doing the production for them, if they like the price
I forgot to add, I really like using SW for mould designs…usually we will make the mould design as a negative and CNC ren-board to get a working mould right away, in this case though we did a positive and made the negative off of it. What do you use to surface the models Rotorage, are you a Rapidform user, if so, how do you like it?
Oh wow a big M builder huh? I love the M series. Any pics of the Silver one installed?
No I don’t use Rapidform just SW ScanTo3D. I love SW for all the tools it has, it’s like a virtual toy store because you can make anything you can imagine.
The Ren board is real nice for making plugs and low vol. mould isn’t it…
No pics of the silver one yet, the end user has it but I don’t think it was installed yet…I sorta fell into building for the M series, I bought a M3 for myself and really like building things so it made sense. It grew from there…We white label manufacture for a number of aftermarket companies and small niche OEM manufacturers of vehicles. We do industrial & some defence stuff, the latter of the three I mentioned we just started on so i am not sure where it is going to go yet.
The ren-board is nice, we can actually get 30 to 40 parts out of ren-board moulds before it’s time to replace or build a composite mould. Problem with the ren-board is it’s hardness, gets niks and can chip easy, epoxy fairing compound is your friend when that happens, but it is nice to work with
To be honest, I have never tried that scan to 3d option with solidworks, does it surface the model when imported? So it is scanning it as a solid? If so, have I been missing the boat all this time. The next engine unit is actually pretty good, I really like it but for large parts it just takes so long and we risk not getting an accurate scan by having to stitch the scans together.
When you guys scan a physical solid into parametric space how does it work? I know the measurement device takes a series a point but what happens after that in your software?
In your case Rotorage, does it create a solid parasolid from the measured solid of your part? Does Solidworks recognize the features so you can make changes e.g. change fillet radius, remove features etc.
Same questions to you SLS but regarding Geomagic.
I think 3d scanning is really cool and it saves a lot of time in creating CAD models, especially since the trend seems to be curvy organic shapes these days. Thanks for sharing!
With Geomagic, we import either a .STL or .OBJ file, it is a file of a scan which is essentially just in negative space meaning there really is no reference to it a software program like Solidworks can use. You can open an .STL in solidworks but you cannot work with it since there is no surface to speak of.
Geomagic or a program like Rapidform for Next Engine users allows a .STL file to be surfaced with a solid transform. The software repairs the mesh/dots of the scan, fills in holes, allows the user to clean up non-required scan data and then we essentially run the program options to begin surfacing, the software attempts to assign each “form” of the scan as either a rectangle, or triangle, or fillet, or edge or etc…etc…plains it cannot recognize are deemed free-form. The software operator will then go in and correct whatever surfaces the software cannot define until we have a fully surfaced model.
I kinda simplified the work involved in doing it by the above description, but in a nutshell that is how it works for just about any surfacing program. Once it is surfaced and correct we then go to solidworks to modify the file if design changes occur. Once a surfaced file you can modify anything on it.
I am not sure how the 3D scan option in Solidworks does it, but I am going to try it when I am back at my shop
The 3D scanning does save a lot of time, we don’t use it near as much as we should and it is not perfect, but I cannot imagine not having it. A good example, I mentioned the 2012 X6M, that vehicle was brand spanking new and I needed the profile of the bumper, how do I get it? Sure I could splash the front bumper but that will take 3 days and more than likely a front bumper re-spray. God forbid the car owner see’s it when it is being splashed. Having the scanner allows us to scan it within a few hours of getting the vehicle and being 100% non-destructive to the vehicle. I now have the B-side of the mould to marry the lip to, the client will design the “A” side and provide me back a file, we marry the two together “A to B” in Solidworks and bingo, we have a file we can cut on the CNC to make either a negative of or a positive.
One thing I will say, having a 3D scanner immediately makes you feel that you need a surfacing software, they are not cheap, then you immediately feel you need a CNC, at least a 3-axis, then you feel you need at least a 5-axis…it just never ends…
Scanning is dependant on the type of scanner, as en example, this part toook 15 minutes to scan. Working on the file after scan was another thing, took about 5 hours of working on it to make it ready for the CNC
