About the Project
The PES Scanning team were recently approached to help in the reverse engineering of an ornate metal casting used as a floor grill in a historic building. We had the original cast piece to work from and therefore we were able to reproduce an accurate representation for the restoration programme.
The first stage of the project was to capture accurate 3D data from the original cast piece using our GOM blue light optical 3D scanning system. Due to the nature of the piece we chose to scan using a 300 measurement volume lens, giving us a resolution of 0.124 mm.
Once we had completed the scanning stage the polygon mesh, which is generated from the scan was passed onto the PES Performance design engineers, who cleaned up the data, using the GOM software then transferred the data to CAD in an .stl format.
3D Scanning
Structured blue light scanners such as our GOM system use ultra-high accuracy / resolution optical imaging to triangulate points from multiple locations across the object to be scanned. By comparing millions of pixels, this process produces a precise point cloud which can be interpolated into a CAD model, for use in reverse engineering and product optimisation projects.
3D optical scanning is ideal for scanning components such as sheet metal parts, tools and dies, turbine blades, moulded/cast parts and detailed prototypes.
Once the scan data was processed by the design engineers it was sent to our client, who used the data to create a new mould before casting a perfect representation of the original part. The moulds can now be used to reproduce one-off floor grills or multiple parts when required in the restoration programme.