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few years ago a Missouri-based casting company, O’Fallon Casting, realized that its touch probe-based inspection system was stretched to the limit for most of its rapid prototyping work. O’Fallon Casting took a new approach by installing a cross scanner from Nikon Metrology plus PolyWorks software from InnovMetric Inc.

A prototyping project, involving the housing for an integrated wing-tip light of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, illustrates the innovation of 3-D scanning and point cloud-based inspection. O’Fallon engineers inspected both the housing’s foam pattern and inherent aluminum part, and managed to cut the entire process throughput time by 50 percent. More important, the countless measurement points they had acquired and the CAD comparison analysis graphics enabled them to better supervise the process and eliminate prototype rounds while delivering top quality.

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