hey guys,now that i have gotten my new machine operational and fairly used to working with cad/cam, i have begun to get frustrated in trying to program an existing part (reverse engineer) most of my aggravations are with locating bolt holes and such when trying to copy or duplicate a part. plus my drawing skills are very limited to 2d lines and arcs,fillets at the moment.

i am ready to drop $40,000 on a 7 axis faro portable cmm,before i do does anyone have any better suggestions,and is this the best option.

need to digitize complex 3d parts for production or modification,and to reverse engineer existing components to speed up time to market.

thanks in advance.

We are have gone thru the same thing with our cylinder head program.
You can get a micro scribe arm, pretty cheap on price, and port it to mastercam, surfcam ect.
You can probe the data points in the cam sytem, and then lay down a tool path.
Also, you can probe on a cnc mill and get data points, we are probing with a hass in 5 axis.
Good luck.

do you mind if i ask what brand probe are you using?

We have a renishaw probe on our haas.

If you want to reverse engineer parts, you can get a microscribe, or faro, faro is high end. You can get the data points you need, and then model your part in a farily high end cad/cam system. Microscribe and faro, can be ported to master cam or surfcam, solid works and others software packages.

I don't know if this will interest you or not, but you might want to read this thread as well as a couple more on the linked forum.

The guy doing the development of this is doing it for digitiziing engine heads for porting.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=4730.new;topicseen#new

Mike

thank you for the advise,i have had several suggestions to get the Microscribe mx for $9000 complete insted of the Faro $40,000 arm.

i was told the Faro was more for inspection at high accuracy and i could get by with the Microscribe just for the reverse ingeneering aspect that we are looking for.

any opinions?

I have the low end microscribe, I purchased off ebay, for 1k, it's has .009 accuracy, works great.
For my application, I grab data at the start, mid and end points on my part with the microscribe. I have the microscribe interfaced to mastercam, I now have rough data points in mastercam, that I can lay down some rough surfaces. I have a custom post, that will post a g code output to my HAAS mill with 5 axis, the drives a the touch probe in 5 axis, and grabs data off the part, the data is sent back to mastercam, were I have the extact data off the part, no I can genrate surfaces, and lay down a tool path in 5 axis to cut the part.
It's a pretty slick set up.
:)

wow that certainly sounds like the hot ticket.

we have pretty much settled on a new cad cam package X2 mill level3 thanks for the imput.

thanks for your replys

I don't know if this will interest you or not, but you might want to read this thread as well as a couple more on the linked forum.

The guy doing the development of this is doing it for digitiziing engine heads for porting.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=4730.new;topicseen#new

Mike

thanks turmite i read the link and it is very helpful.

just to update our last conversation,

we have been working our new MastercamX2 mill level 3 with solids and surfaces software for about three months now and i gotta tell ya im very happy,the software is amazing and the support is second to none.

however the void in our budget left from our software purchase didnt give us the ability to go with the Faro arm,it was a nice piece but at 50k-$80k there was no way we were going to be able to handle that cost.

after some searching the great folks at emicroscribe.com provided us with a great solution with 2 thousandths accuracy and plenty of workspace for our application.

we are looking forward to receiving our MX 5 in the next week or so we will provide feedback on its merits as we use it

thanks to all of you for your help,i am sure i will need more of it later.

Good to hear things have worked out.
It's really hard to beat mastercam, these guys have really thought about what they want to do for sure. They have been at for around 20 years and it shows.
You will love the microscribe for sure.

i have had the Microscribe for 2 weeks now and all i got to say is WOW!

i am definately one happy camper,i would highly reccomend the microscribe to any one looking for a low cost alternative to reverse engineering.

thanks DRD for your help.