Production Kept on Target with Reverse Engineering

Keystone Sporting Arms, LLC (www.crickett.com; Milton, PA), the fourteenth largest producer of sports rifles and rifle barrels, faced a problem when it acquired another rifle stock manufacturer: there were no CAD models of the new stocks that they had attained, and therefore, no way to reproduce them.  Previously, Keystone had used the scanning services of GKS Inspection Services, a division of Laser Design.  But a decision was made to purchase a portable Surveyor FA-Series scanner from Laser Design, thereby enabling them to bring their scanning projects in-house, giving them greater flexibility and also saving time.  The system is based on an 8-ft, 7-axis Faro Platinum Arm and a high-accuracy SLP-330 laser probe.

Because the 24 gun stocks in questions have involved, irregular shapes, a non-contact 3D scanner was deemed superior to manual or touch probe measurement.  Scanning a stock is performed in two passes.  Raw scan data, which contains more than 18 million data coordinates, is edited and the surface model is created using Geomagic Studio 10.  It is then exported to Mastercam as an IGES file to create the CNC toolpaths.  The entire task is complete in about three hours.