Scanning for Better Products
Interactive CAD Solutions (interactivecadsolutions.com) is a mechanical engineering design firm that specializes in CAD, drafting, reverse engineering, finite element analysis, rapid prototyping, and stereolithography services. According to Robert Conley, who heads up the company, “People come to me when they can’t figure out how to solve their problem any other way. They are usually at their wit’s end.” Among the organizations that they’ve worked with include Peerless Tool & Machine, Lunt Silver Works and FuelCell Energy. Sculptors, inventors, museums, medical schools, and dentists have availed themselves of the company’s services.
To help his clients solve their difficult design issues, Robert Conley has spent hundreds of hours creating and manipulating scanned data. “For me, high quality data makes all the difference,” said Conley. “A scan without backscatter is much easier to post-process into something useable.” Conley owns several scanning products, but his go-to machine is the Roland LPX-600 3D laser scanner from Roland DGA (rolanddga.com). The LPX-600 uses advanced non-contact laser sensors to quickly generate precise models of objects up to 16-in. tall and 10-in. in diameter. “The data I get from the LPX is just much cleaner, which saves me a lot of time,” said Conley.
Providing an example of the time savings, Conley recalled being asked to run a test for a professor at MIT on the capabilities of two scanners, both of which are owned by Interactive CAD Solutions. To get an apples-to-apples comparison, the professor asked Conley to use each device to scan the same object: an egg. Conley ran rotary scans of the top and bottom of the egg on each machine. On the Roland, Conley reported a 30-minute scan time with 10 minutes of clean up work in Rapidform 3D scanning software (rapidform.com). On the other machine, the scan time was 3 hours, and it took Conley one hour to clean up the data in Rapidform, due to errors in aligning the models.
An interesting job was scanning helmets worn by the Mercury mission astronauts for the Smithsonian Institution, which wanted the information for creating molds for replicas. This proved to be challenging, Conley explained, because the helmet visors are translucent and the laser scan goes right through it. So they came up with a solution: dusting the visor with flux powder, which is ordinarily used to find cracks in welds. This not only allowed them to get accurate scans, but, importantly, given that these are national treasures, the helmets weren’t discolored or damaged.
Conley also uses the scanner to help design parts to fit existing equipment, which is particularly important when drawings aren’t available, as was the case when helping a company develop an accessory for a rifle. He had the rifle, so he scanned it, then used the resulting data for the development of an accessory.
In another case, a customized beverage dispensing system company, The Chill Station, had a prototype product, but needed drawings of the prototype to allow them to go into production with the unit. So Conley scanned it. “Without the Roland scanner I’d be flying blind, with no way to compare the as-built model to the CAD models. Now I have full information and I can just work the problem,” Conley said.
