A mold maker that switched from using a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) to a laser scanning service bureau saved an average of one week per reverse engineering project by reducing digitizing and modeling time. In the past, the tool company had to dedicate a skilled person for at least one week to reverse engineer and model even fairly simple molds or parts that customers wanted to replicate. This reduced productive capacity according to the company’s president, who decided to try an outside service bureau to free up his employees to spend more time on customer projects. “I discovered that due to the speed of laser scanning, the service bureau was actually able to do the job for less than what it cost to do the job in-house,” he said. “Best of all, the service bureau frees up my people so they can dedicate more of their time to the precision machining and fitting aspects of the job.”

Customers frequently ask the injection mold manufacturer to build molds with no up-to-date geometry because many of the parts were designed before the customer started using CAD.  “Reverse engineering is a significant part of our business,” the company president said.  “The amount of time required to digitize a part with a CMM depends on its complexity. Even fairly simple parts with one or two contoured surfaces could take several days. As the parts get more complex, the time required rises quickly to the point that it becomes impractical to completely reverse engineer more complicated components and assemblies. I took a look around at several emerging reverse engineering technologies and quickly came to the conclusion that laser scanning had the most potential to solve the problem.”

Laser scanners work by projecting a line of laser light onto surfaces, while cameras continuously triangulate the changing distance and profile of the laser as it sweeps along, enabling the object to be accurately replicated. They collect thousands of points every second at a higher level of accuracy than is possible with contact methods so they are able to accurately digitize much more complicated parts. The elimination of the need to maintain contact with the work piece also means that the results are independent of the skill of the operator.

“I heard about GKS Inspection Services’ unique service bureau approach to laser scanning,” said the company president.   “You send them your part and they provide a CAD file that describes the part to a very high level of accuracy.  The turnaround time was also faster than what it would have taken to do it here, even with shipping time taken into account.”  “We were very happy with the results of our projects.  We saved at least a week on one particular part.  On more complicated parts that we have completed since then, the timesavings has been as much as a month,” he said.  “The accuracy of the file that we received from GKS Inspection Services was better than what we could have achieved with a CMM. In addition, switching to laser scanning means that we now have the confidence that we can reverse engineer any customer part or mold regardless of its complexity.

More GKS News and Stories
(Metrology and Laser Scanning Services)

View Laser Design News and Stories
(Laser Scanning Systems)