Race Car Seat
Reverse Engineering is Essential for Manufacturing a Complex Race Car Seat
The Summary:
Direct Dimensions reverse engineers a wide range of complex components across many industries. This project shows how we used a particular combination of reverse engineering tools to create an accurate parametric 3D CAD model of a complicated prototype race car seat.
The Backstory:
Gargoyles is a material applications company with a unique patented technology that can be utilized in a broad range of markets. Their customer base is very diverse and includes the military, aerospace, medical and automotive industries. When it came to manufacturing items in their patented material they needed to find a way to accurately and quickly reverse engineer the existing prototypes for the manufacturing process.
The Challenge:
Gargoyles contacted Direct Dimensions with a uniquely designed prototype race car seat that they wanted to produce using their proprietary material. A 3D CAD file of the existing unit was required to design the tooling and molds for the seat but it had such a complex, organic shape that it proved very difficult for their designers to create the model using traditional CAD software.
The Solution:
- The race car seat was sent to the Direct Dimensions’ facility. The seat was scanned using a FARO ScanArm. This laser-line scanner is the perfect solution for organic shapes of this size. The seat was digitized an accuracy of approximately +/-0.002” (50 microns) in about an hour.
- The resulting dense set of raw 3D points, called a “point cloud,” was then processed using Rapidform’s XOR reverse engineering software. This product was selected for several reasons including its ability to automatically process the raw scan data into surface ‘region’ groups making it easier to create the surfaces.
- The fully parametric final 3D CAD model could then be used by the customer for many purposes including designing molds and tooling, redesigning of the seat, or further engineering analysis.
The Benefits:
- Time – The FARO ScanArm is no question the fastest way to capture the complex shape of a car seat. Other methods could easily take many hours.
- Cost – The FARO ScanArm and Rapidform XOR software is the most affordable reverse engineering combination on the market for projects of this type.
- Accuracy – This solution provided more than enough accuracy for this project.
- Completeness – the entire seat was captured and modeled, nothing was missed.
- Format – the final 3D CAD deliverable was fully parametric in SolidWorks – exactly as needed by the customer.
The Bottom Line:
This project is just another example of the work that Direct Dimensions does every day. Do you need prototype parts reverse engineered accurately into parametric 3D models? Contact the experts at Direct Dimensions now to get a free proposal for your next project.
