Scanning information

[Hack]

I am looking for information regarding purchasing / building a 3 d scanner. It's use will be to scan hand and power tools for our shop and then convert them to some format that can be used by my cad software and then the profiles routed into a board. These will then become story boards for our 5 S work in the shop. A place for everything and everything in its place.

While the majority of the tools will be less then 24" in lenth, some may be up to 36. I had looked online at the Nextengine product and it seemed ok for the price. I am concerned about it's ability to handle larger items although one could stitch together items it appeared.

Also read about the David scanner, ad the 3D3 solution. Now I am just confused and not sure what would work best for my application.

Thoughts and insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dan

[awerby]

I'd love to sell you one, don't get me wrong, but if all you need is a profile (which is a 2d cutout as I understand the term) you might be overthinking this particular project. I'd suggest laying the tool in question down on a piece of paper, tracing around it with a magic marker, then photographing the result with a digital camera (make sure you are lined up straight in front of it to avoid distortion).

Bring that up as a background image in your CAD program, and retrace it with your vector curve tools. This will make a line that your CAM program can follow when routing out the shapes in engraving mode. Of course, if you don't have all that gear, you can achieve pretty much the same result by tracing directly onto the plywood board and following the line with a sabre-saw.

Andrew Werby
ComputerSculpture.com — Home Page for Discount Hardware & Software

I am looking for information regarding purchasing / building a 3 d scanner. It's use will be to scan hand and power tools for our shop and then convert them to some format that can be used by my cad software and then the profiles routed into a board. These will then become story boards for our 5 S work in the shop. A place for everything and everything in its place.

While the majority of the tools will be less then 24" in lenth, some may be up to 36. I had looked online at the Nextengine product and it seemed ok for the price. I am concerned about it's ability to handle larger items although one could stitch together items it appeared.

Also read about the David scanner, ad the 3D3 solution. Now I am just confused and not sure what would work best for my application.

Thoughts and insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dan

[Hack]

I have traced the tool outline onto graph paper and then drew them up in CAD using the grids in my cad program to match the graph paper. This allowed me to get them pretty close but I would like to do better. What you suggest sounds plausible (I have never tried it) and should be quicker.

What I know however is that I would like to think in terms of 3d. I would like to provide a cradle not just an outline for the tools. Picture a simple screw driver. The handle is different then the shaft. A simple blank cutout leaves the shaft unsupported and sloppy fitting in the cutout.

A dificult one right now is a pneumatic impact gun. They are about 4" thick and i would like to provide a cradle for it, sort of a negative mold. I mention this only to show the kind of detail I would like to reach.

Please keep the suggestions coming.

[123CNC]

If you have the router already and run Mach3, consider looking at the Tormach Scanner as an option. If you don't need great detail just use a touch probe or even a wood dowel and use the router to pick up major dimensions.

You could also consider sending your tools to Khalid (on Cnczone) in Pakistan for a free scan.

A seemingly simple yet interesting project. I hope you'll share your chosen solution and some pics of the results. Cheers.

SSSSSerious = 5S Serious

[Hack]

At work we have a printer / scanner / copier machine so I traced out some tools onto a pc of paper and ran it through the scanner function. It ourputs a pdf file. Tried opening up the pdf file in CUT2D, but it gave me a message stating the "this file probably only contains bitmap data" and would not open the file.

Any way around this?

[ger21]

A scanner can only output bitmap info. A workaround would be to save it in an image format and use a raster to vector converter on it.