機械 & 金型

What do you mean “it’s no longer available”?

What do you do when your business’ process depends on a critical piece of equipment, and the manufacturer tells you: “sorry, we don’t make parts for that anymore”.

Conzept Solutions GmbH (www.conzept.net), is a German engineering and 3D Scanning services company. It was founded in 1988 and has been performing design engineering and reverse engineering and inspection services using the most innovative hardware & software. In other words, Conzept Solutions’ customer don’t bring them the easy problems.

For instance, Conzept Solutions routinely reverse-engineers intricate cast parts to recreate the complex molds. These are castings in which there are many hidden areas and other difficult-to-scan areas. Conzept Solutions had devised an excellent process using a powerful cutting-machine, designed and made in the 1960s, to cut the original casting while removing minimal material.

This machine has become an integral part of their castings reverse-engineering process. The cutting machine uses a component called an extender wheel, a replaceable assembly, very crucial for cutting quality. However, after using the machine for many years, Conzept Solutions was informed by the manufacturer that the extender wheel is no longer available and the manufacturer will no longer support that product.

Conzept Solutions searched unsuccessfully for a replacement part, one that would yield similar cutting quality. After searching further, they found no substitute parts or new cutting equipment that met their needs. Their only remaining option was to redesign and manufacture this critical component from the worn part that remained.

Conzept Solutions — an expert at reverse engineering and at XOR — wasted no time in scanning and measuring the old components using their Steinbichler Comet 5 white-light scanner.

From that precise scan data, they were able to use XOR to capture both the shape of the product as well as the design intent. XOR’s result was a Pro E, native CAD model with not only the shape of the original cutting wheel, but the full history tree, describing how each feature was designed, and how it related to other features in the assembly. Per their operator, a CAD model in Siemens NX or Solidworks could also have easily been generated. From this CAD model, Conzept Solutions was able to manufacture a modern replacement part for an old, but integral machine.

Conzept Solutions’ Application Engineer; Edward Margo, noted that Conzept Solutions a lot of time and resource and gave special mention to the intuitive CAD-like user interface, and especially the means to create parametric CAD features directly from the scan data, and the Live-Transfer that brings the native CAD model into ProE.

The power of XOR was useful not only for this critical piece of capital equipment, but also for the upgraded reverse engineering services that Conzept Solutions offers to their customers. Not only was Conzept Solutions pleased with their new components, but their customers have been very happy to see little interruption in the process on which those customers are depending.