Originally Posted by jalessi  Jim,
Welcome to the Zone.
The Roland 540 is fine for really small parts like jewelry however not for prototype race car parts.
[The MDX-540 has travels of more than 15" x 15" x 6"; that's a bit large for jewelry, although it could be used for that. It's a fairly massive machine that can cut plastics and non-ferrous metals, although it's not recommended for steel. Depending on what race-car parts you're talking about, it could work well for them.]
For reverse engineering there is no problem attaching a digitizer probe to 99.999 % of any CNC machine that runs Mach3 including the Tormach.
Mach3 has a Digitizing/Probing Plugin.
http://www.machsupport.com/plugins.php
Then all you need is a digitizing probe and point cloud software to go along with the cad program of your choice.
Jeff... |
[Roland's piezo-electric digitizing probe works better than the typical deflection switch probe, being both physically finer and more sensitive, and the software to produce mesh files from the scans is included with it. They also include CAM software which, while it doesn't have all the features of MasterCAM, isn't nearly as difficult to master. For someone without a lot of machining background, it's a pretty good way to get started with all this. But you've gotten some good business advice here; making stuff isn't the hard part - making money for making stuff is what's hard...]
Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com