Reverse Engineering a 3D Pipe
This blog article will illustrate how to extract the centerline of a 3D pipe with compound angles. Extracting the centerline of a 3D pipe that contains angles in 2 dimensions is not that complicated. However, when you have compound angles, and the tube is bending in the X, Y, and Z directions simultaneously, extracting the centerline can be quite challenging. For example, below we have a prototype of ½ of a bicycle handle, printed on the HP Printer, in Nylon 12. It contains bends in compound angles. Let’s say you don’t have the CAD file to work with and would like to extract the centerline, so that you can create a true CAD file, improve it, and then eventually create a manufacturing drawing . . . One solution to accomplish this is to use Geomagic Design X software and this is how it would work. First, you would need to capture the physical geometry of the handle bar using a 3D scanner and then export an STL file. Next, import the STL file into Geomagic Design X. Design X has a function called: Sweep Wizard. With a few clicks, it produces a fully editable feature tree to create this shape. But what is [...]
ProShop – AME 2017 Featured Exhibitor
A featured exhibitor at this year’s Advanced Manufacturing Expo, ProShop is a leader in Manufacturing ERP and shop management software. ProShop, a modern web based ERP that can manage every aspect of your front office and shop floor. Known for its interface and web-based navigation, ProShop links all corners of a company together to allow seamless management and decision making. It includes a collection of features for ERP, MES, and QMS modules is the only 3rd Party Solution Provider for Mastercam in the Shop Management Software and integrates cutting tool management with Mastercam. The founders are manufacturers at heart and they originally created ProShop to help manage their own CNC shop. At first, they only had the intention to use it privately for their own business. However, over the years they continued to develop and refine the software. It received favorable praise from customers and peers, who eventually urged them to release ProShop to the public market. It has grown today to be a trusted and highly efficient solution for machine shops, fabricators, job shops, contract manufacturers and others in highly regulated industries. Watch the video below to learn more. [one_full last="yes" spacing="yes" center_content="no" hide_on_mobile="no" background_color="" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" background_position="left top" hover_type="none" link="" border_position="all" border_size="0px" [...]
SolidWorks 2017 3D Offset on Curved Surfaces
There is new functionality in SolidWorks 2017 that allows you to offset 3D curves on a surface. Offsetting 2D geometry is very efficient. It allows you to quickly grab 2D geometry and create a same shape contour with a specified gap distance. However, when working with 3D sketches containing 3D curves, it’s not as simple. As of SolidWorks 2016, many steps were required to accomplish this task. Now in SolidWorks 2017, it got a whole lot easier. Notice in the example below, we have a surface body that contains 3D curved boundaries. To create the 3D offset, you can simply go to the sketch tab, and click on the Offset on Surface button. This quickly launches you into a 3D sketch environment. From this point, all you need to do is click directly on the edges, enter your offset value, and choose your offset direction. If you wanted to choose the boundary on all sides of the face, you can just choose the face itself, and the command will propagate the edges accordingly. This command is ideal to use if you wanted to punch out the center of a 3D surface, or even create the design for an over molding, all the meanwhile [...]
Metal 3D Printing for Manufacturing
Reprint from www.techcrunch.com Desktop Metal has already earned a number of fans with its 3D printed metal technology — Lowe’s, Caterpillar and BMW were all among its earliest clients. As first noted by CNBC, the Massachusetts-based startup is also getting some healthy monetary support, adding $115 million of venture funds to its coffers this week. The Series D features a number of high profile names, including New Enterprise Associates, GV (formerly Google Ventures), GE Ventures, Future Fund and Techtronic Industries, the holdings company that owns Hoover U.S. and Dirt Devil. Founded in 2013 by four MIT professors, Desktop Metal isn’t the first company to bring metal 3D printing to market, but it’s probably the most efficient. By its own measure, the company’s machines are able to print objects at up to 100-times the speed of their competitors. That’s good news for those clients using Studio, the prototyping machine the company announced last year — but even more useful for those planning to use the upcoming Production, a system designed to bring the technology to manufacturing. Speed has been of the main bottlenecks in mainstreaming 3D printing for manufacturing — metal or otherwise. The Production system isn’t going to replace wide scale manufacturing any [...]
Cimquest Expands its Mastercam Team
Big News from Cimquest . . . We Have Expanded our Mastercam Team (and Customer Base) We are very excited to announce that our Mastercam support team and customer base have significantly grown. Cimquest and Fisher Unitech have engaged in an exchange of service between the two companies and Cimquest will now be supporting the Fisher Unitech Mastercam customers. Additionally, Cimquest Stratasys customers will be supported by Fisher Unitech. Fisher Unitech will no longer be representing Mastercam and Cimquest will no longer be representing Stratasys. We would like to welcome Brian Brown, Tony DiSanto, Chris Jepson, Andy Lowry, Todd Patterson, Jeff Reiser and Mike Steelman to our Cimquest team. We are excited to have such a strong team of Mastercam experts to add to our world-class talent who together will offer unparalleled support, consulting and training services to the manufacturing community. With the addition of the Fisher Mastercam technical team, Cimquest will be the largest Mastercam support organization in the world! Although Cimquest will no longer be selling and supporting Stratasys products, we now have the opportunity to build a much more diversified 3D printer portfolio to better serve our customers’ needs. We are very excited that we are diversifying our 3D Printing focus into [...]
CMM Inspection without a Master Part
Have you ever needed to inspect parts in a CMM, without having a master part? Automated CMMs can be a great time saver when inspecting parts on the shop floor. Traditionally, a master part is measured to generate a master data set. The same routine is then automated and used to measure each production part. Each production data set is then compared to the master data set to determine the actual size of the part and whether it is within user defined tolerances. But what if you don’t have a master part available, or one that was closely produced to drawing nominal? This is where the CMM Master can be a great solution. The CMM Master, based on the Renishaw Equator platform, is a portable, automated CMM, calibrated for high production shop floor inspection. In conjunction with the Verisurf software, it is volumetrically error mapped to increase the traditional Renishaw Equator accuracy down to .0005”. Here you see the CMM Master running an automated measurement routine. When it’s done, it automatically generates a date and time stamped report. One thing that makes the CMM Master unique is that a master part is not required in order to perform on the fly measurements. You [...]