RavenWorks, a Maple Grove, Minnesota, company known for its automotive machining and testing business, is launching its own line of automotive parts. RavenWorks’ employees, who are hot-rod enthusiasts, saw a need in the market for replacement parts for vintage vehicles. They decided to carefully select and manufacture extinct parts for which there was a large demand among the hot-rod restoration community.
Many replacement parts are not always readily available to restore unique and vintage vehicles. These difficult-to-find parts may be expensive, and even if they can be found, they may be so worn that their functionality comes into question. RavenWorks engineers decided to reverse engineer the parts they often needed in their rebuilding work to ensure their quality. Once the new parts are made, they need to be inspected to make sure they are geometrically correct and physically sound.
RavenWorks’ owner had heard of Laser Design Inc. and 3-D laser scanning through a vendor referral. He investigated further and realized that noncontact 3-D laser scanning is ideal for reverse engineering and inspection. A complete measurement method, 3-D laser scanning captures everything on an object’s surface, including free-form shapes and fine details, so they can be accurately re-created or verified. Because laser scanning is a noncontact measuring method, it allows extremely consistent capturing of parts’ geometry by removing the human error factor.
RavenWorks purchased and installed a Laser Design SURVEYOR WS-3040 3D dual-purpose scanning system with dual lasers, the SLP-250 for smaller parts, and the SLP-500 for mid-size to large parts. As their first step in becoming proficient in the laser scanning process, company engineers attended training sessions on scanning with the SURVEYOR system, as well as how to model the data using Geomagic Qualify software.
The fully automated, CNC programmable SURVEYOR WS system provides RavenWorks with a high-accuracy (0.011 mm) and high-resolution (0.005 mm) system that is also versatile and easy to use. The system includes a Renishaw PH-10 (CNC head indexer) and a fourth-axis rotary stage for the most flexible six-axis, 3-D scanning available. The dual-system technology is also capable of using coordinate measuring machine (CMM) touch probes to acheive accuracies of up to 0.0025 mm.
Laser scanning technology works by projecting a line of laser light onto a surface while cameras continuously triangulate the changing distance and profile of the laser line as it sweeps along. The laser line passes back and forth over the area until the complete surface is captured. Irregular shapes are measured just as easily as prismatic ones, and they are instantaneously replicated digitally on-screen. The scanner picks up tens of thousands of points per second and generates huge numbers of data coordinates in a point cloud. If the object is large, several scans are made to capture the entire part, and then the point-cloud data files are rotated into the same reference frame and assembled into an exact, 360°, 3-D model of the scanned part.
One of the first projects RavenWorks’ engineers performed with the laser scanner was to scan the transmission shaft of a Ferrari for reverse engineering. A tooth was broken on a gear of the shaft, and a suitable replacement part “was impossible to find,” according to the engineer in charge. By scanning the broken shaft, they were quickly able to re-create the missing geometry using the Geomagic software and model the virtually “repaired” part using SolidWorks, a 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) software. The CAD model was then fed directly into RavenWorks’ CNC machine to produce the new part exactly. Being able to machine hard-to-find parts speeds up RavenWorks’ restoration process by keeping it in-house and removing the search and shipping activities from the turnaround time.
The scan data of the transmission shaft worked seamlessly with the CNC machine to create a usable, accurate part that was eventually used in the Ferrari restoration.
RavenWorks has also scanned several other parts for individual production or short production runs. These have included valves for engines that have certain angles into the seat on the engine head; the scan data precisely records the angle from the valve, and from that, a tool is made to match up the components. The company plans to create a valve-stem library of scan data so that the CAD models can be reused, saving more of RavenWorks’ engineering time and resources.
The in-house SURVEYOR WS system will also eventually be used to inspect RavenWorks’ high-performance hand-made and machine-fabricated prototype parts with the 3-D CAD models generated from the scan data. Being able to easily duplicate precision hand-crafted and performance parts with high accuracy for testing, replacement, and advanced design, plus inspect the product with the scanning system, will save RavenWorks tremendous amounts of time and money. With 3-D CAD models made directly from the physical parts, the labor intensive, trial-and-error process of product development is no longer needed to deliver enhanced-performance replacement parts to the company’s hot-rod and vintage vehicle restoration customers.
Laser Design Inc. has been a leading developer, supplier, and supporter of ultraprecise, 3-D laser scanning systems and measurement services for more than 30 years. Its Surveyor line of automated and portable 3-D laser scanning systems capture the 3-D shape of objects with complex geometries and free-form surface data for inspection, analysis, and reverse engineering with precision, speed, and accuracy. Laser Design operates GKS Global Services, an in-house service division offering complete 3-D scanning, reverse engineering, and dimensional inspection services using top-of-the-line Laser Design systems as well as traditional, portable, and CT scanners.
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