GKS/Laser Design

When engineers at Tilia made the decision to design a VillaWare® branded waffler, they faced a major challenge. The new VillaWare waffler goes far beyond previous products producing a waffle with a complex 3D shape, in this case a bouquet of roses. "We already have the reputation for designing award-winning waffle makers but now we are enabling our customers to use our products to produce waffles that are not only delicious but beautiful as well,"said Jesse Patterson, mechanical design engineer for Tilia. "I don't know of any waffle iron that has ever offered a waffle with an organic 3D design before."

Tilia hired a studio to sculpt a design for the surface of the waffler that incorporates a bouquet of roses while also meeting the geometric requirements needed to pull the waffle out of the iron. The design exceeded the company's expectations but was so geometrically complex that engineers felt it would be very difficult to manually create the solid model geometry required for accurate and efficient manufacturing. "It would have been very difficult for a CAD designer to duplicate the studio's creation by hand," Patterson said. "If we had asked one of our designers to take on this arduous task, the chances are they would have spent weeks or even months without ever capturing the beauty of the floral design.

"We had reproduced physical models several other times using laser scanning and felt this would be the right tool for the job," said Jesse Patterson, mechanical design engineer for Tilia. But with a relatively small number of parts that needed scanning every year, it made no sense for Tilia to buy a laser scanner. Patterson said that soon before this need arose, Tilia had begun working with a service bureau operated by Laser Design Inc. (Minneapolis, MN) that offers laser scanning services on a project basis. "We originally found them on the Internet," he said. "We were in a crunch and needed to quickly convert a physical object into a 3D CAD design. They kept their word by meeting our schedule and the quality of their work was outstanding.

"When the waffler project came along it was natural to use them again," Patterson said. "I shipped the model to them so it arrived on a Monday. They scanned the parts and generated a point cloud in which each individual point was accurate within 20 microns and the surfaces generated from the point cloud were accurate to at least 0.004 inch. By Thursday they e-mailed me a 3D solid model of the waffle iron. We checked some of the surfaces and they were right on. Just as important, they had captured the organic beauty of the design, which would have been almost impossible by hand. The ability to translate this complex model into a CAD in just a few days for a very reasonable price played a key role in getting the product to market on schedule."