An Overview of 3D Scanners
As a good rule of thumb, there are three areas of highest concern when selecting the right 3D scanner for your needs. 3D Scanners should be selected based on their accuracy, their resolution, and in cases of metrology, for their repeatability. Accuracy is perhaps the most intuitive as it is simply the distance that the scan points will be from the surface being captured. Resolution (aka “Point Spacing”) is a scanner’s ability to capture fine detail. It is essentially the density of the point cloud. So when scanning something with a lot of small detail, such as a coin, a very high resolution is required. In considering resolution, the lower the number (i.e. the more dense the point cloud is) the greater the resolution. Repeatability is simply a test we would typically run where one person scans a part several times and colleagues do the same and we want to ensure that the differences between any of the collected scans is within an acceptable deviation tolerance. In this post, we are going to give you an overview of the Shining 3D scanners and we will explain what the best applications are for each scanner. All have excellent repeatability. The Autoscan Inspec Excellent for [...]
Mastercam 2024 High Speed Pencil Toolpath
In this blog post, we will take a look at how the addition of avoidance geometry streamlines the use of the Mastercam 2024 High-speed pencil toolpath. If you create a pencil toolpath and select the geometry surrounding the radius that you want to machine and look at the resulting motion of the toolpath (that is set to one pass), you will notice that the tool is diving into the part at every surface intersection. In previous versions of Mastercam, you would need to create a wireframe boundary or simplified solid to avoid all these unwanted cuts. If you open the toolpath’s model geometry page and add some avoidance geometry using the right-click menu, you can quickly select Add remaining entities to avoid all non-machining surfaces. And lastly, when the toolpath regenerates you are left with only the desired motion machining your radius which is a smooth single pass driving the tool directly up the corner radius with no collisions. As you can see, the addition of avoidance surfaces to the Mastercam 2024 High Speed Pencil toolpath has made this a much simpler and user-friendly toolpath. Please be sure to sign up for our 2 Minute Tuesday video series to receive tips and tricks [...]
3D Printing in Eyewear Manufacturing
Since 1976, Plastinax has been manufacturing eyewear for some of the world’s biggest brands. They work with global customers to design sunglasses, optical frames, and safety frames, then move into high-volume production, injection molding as many as 80,000 to 100,000 frames each month. Lead time and responsiveness are of utmost importance — in order to remain competitive in a global market, Plastinax has to expedite design and manufacturing so that their frames can travel from their base in Mauritius to their customers on every continent. Plastinax, owned by the ENL Group, uses Formlabs stereolithography (SLA) and selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printers to produce functional prototypes of frames in low volumes for their customers to evaluate and give feedback on before moving to tooling. They also have expanded into 3D printed tooling for low volume runs and bridge production of eyewear components, using the Fuse 1 SLS 3D printer and Nylon 12 Powder. The 3D printing workflow has also increased their responsiveness and expanded the range of designs they can produce. Plastinax Design Engineer Steeven Devasagayaum spoke with us about integrating the Form 2 and Fuse 1 into his workflow, and how 3D printing has changed the company’s approach to design and manufacturing. [...]
3D Scanning in the Automotive Industry
By bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, 3D scanning enables automakers to work with high-fidelity digital twins of physical objects within CAD/CAM/CAE environments, allowing for rapid design iteration, measurement automation, enhanced collaboration, and archiving for historical trend analysis. Here are some of the ways that 3D scanning helps the automotive industry. Reverse engineering 3D scanning is a fast method of creating measurements dense enough on a part to resolve even highly complex surfaces and features, which can be useful for reverse engineering or reconstructing an existing part in CAD. Out-of-production parts or parts designed without CAD (or before CAD) can be scanned and the original design intent can be extracted from the data to generate a new file for future manufacturing. Quality control and 3D inspection Quality control is the stage at which the manufactured part is inspected to make sure it meets all of the required specifications for proper performance, such as whether or not a cylinder cover will fit the intended engine exactly as expected. 3D scanning brings a great deal of speed and accuracy to the inspection process, enabling automotive manufacturers to quickly capture a 3D model of a part and compare it to the part’s original [...]
Revolutionizing Metal Additive Manufacturing: Insights from Desktop Metal, Meltio, and Xact Metal
Revolutionizing Metal Additive Manufacturing: Insights from Desktop Metal, Meltio, and Xact Metal Replayed from a live webinar held on October 26, 2023 Watch the replay of this insightful webinar where industry leaders, Desktop Metal, Meltio, and Xact Metal come together to provide a comprehensive overview of the dynamic metal additive manufacturing market. Discover how these cutting-edge technologies are reshaping the landscape of metal 3D printing and find out how they seamlessly integrate into the evolving market ecosystem.
Increasing CNC Turning Tool Life with Mastercam 2024
This blog post will show you how to increase the life of your roughing CNC turning tools in Mastercam 2024. In this example, we created a standard lathe rough toolpath with very simple math. We used .1” depth of cut and set our stock to zero. When we backplotted the toolpath, we got equally spaced cuts every .2” on the diameter, just as expected. Our first cut was at 1.8” and the second was at 1.6” (remember these numbers for later). This equal spacing can be the cause of premature tool wear, especially in abrasive materials, as the tool is constantly engaging the material at the same point along the cutting edge. Next, we opened up the parameters of the Rough toolpath and again we kept the math simple by adding 100% variable depth. When we backplotted our toolpath in this instance we got a completely different result. Our first cut began at 1.6”, double our original cut, and tapered to 2.0” varying the cut depth 100% of our depth cut value. The second cut started at 1.6” and cut parallel again tapering the engagement of material along the cut edge. The toolpath repeated the process alternating between tapered and straight cuts until it [...]