Amtek Company Support Specialist Lucas Stiim recently hosted a webinar in which he demonstrated how to use a Creaform Go!SCAN SPARK 3D Scanner to capture data from a broken mechanical part, reverse engineer the scan in SolidWorks and print a new functional part on a Stratasys F170 3D printer.
Reverse engineering has many applications in the classroom or lab, whether you’re looking to scan and create variations of a part, scan 3D art to create a hands-on model (something our museum customers do often!), or repair dysfunctional parts (which is what we cover in this webinar).
As you scan your part, here are some tips to remember:
- Always calibrate the scanner before you use it
- Using a Lazy Susan can help rotate smaller parts while scanning
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During scanning move at a slow and consistent speed and be sure not to move the part.
Throughout our webinar, we cover three major steps: Preparing scan data for CAD, modifying the part in CAD, and 3D printing your final model.
Preparing Scan Data for CAD
Watch along and learn how to:
- Create planes and entities within VXmodel that will be converted into CAD.
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Align your model to the origin of the works space using entities and planes.
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Create entities using the geometry of the part that you would like to recreate or modify within CAD
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Convert your entities to SOLIDWORKS. (*If you have a large scan with many different entities, it is recommended to convert the entities in groups).Â
Reverse Engineering/Modifying in CAD
Using Solidworks we covert the entities brought over from VXelements into 2D sketches. These are the steps we follow:
- Using the geometry brought over, create new sketches using those as a reference.
- Modify or add to the 2D sketch to change our scanned parts dimensions.
- Extrude the 2D sketch to a 3D model, adding any features necessary.
3D Printing
To 3D print a part we must first convert the part to the printers file type. This is done is a slicer software like GrabCAD Print. Follow along as we:
- Import the model to GrabCAD Print.
- Modify any settings like Infill and support generation.
- Load the 3D printer with the desired materials.
- Print the part.
- Process the part if needed and compare and test its function.
