3D scanners

[Waitey]

Anyone had a play with one/got one.

They are starting to look really useful.

 

[botfch]

Work with them professionally.

Generally the cheaper ones are ok but you can get better results with a decent dslr camera and good practice.

Depends how much effort you want to put into learning, for plug and play they do work.

 

[James363]

Also work with them, company I work for produces parts for old F1 and similar. We use ours to measure original parts and also if there's an old pattern which makes an unknown casting, we scan the first casting and simulate the machining on it to look for any issues.
We bought ours in 2017, iirc it was about £35k and is a Faro arm style one. It's from a company called Hexagon. As Arch has said above it's all dependent on how much you can spend and how much time and effort you're willing to spend learning.

We use ours mostly to get the exact shape of a casting quickly, which allows us to check clearance and machining allowance. It takes a couple hours to scan and process the file into something useful, but more like a day to scan a whole engine block. The worst bit about 3D scans in general is what to do with the inevitable 'holes' in the file from bits the scanner can't see properly.
Right now I've just used it to scan a combustion chamber so I can overlay the chamber I've just designed and see if we can machine it from the old head without having to laser weld up the chambers. Invaluable tool for such a task.

What they're pretty terrible for is creating geometry you intend to produce parts from. The geometry tends to have issues you'll need to sort and the file sizes are pretty huge. The amount of times I've heard 'cor you'll be out of a job once they can connect a 3d scanner to a 3d printer' as if it's never been done...

 

[Touring_Rob]

Yes, but a very old one.

@Beauvais Motorsport has one and I was well impressed with a scan he sent me. Forget which model he has but its not a 20k one. I could have easily used the point cloud it created to model with, pretty sure he was going to scan a Clio at some point!

 

[James363]

Yes, but a very old one.

@Beauvais Motorsport has one and I was well impressed with a scan he sent me. Forget which model he has but its not a 20k one. I could have easily used the point cloud it created to model with, pretty sure he was going to scan a Clio at some point!

More than a couple of clio bits have been on ours! At one point all 3 of the designers here had 1*2's, we used to park them all in a row every day.

 

[Touring_Rob]

I just read what James wrote above and fully agree. These aren't tools which let you copy parts without a lot of fudging.

One thing which is very annoying (I am quite out of date though) is that most software takes a point cloud and just creates a surface model which I always find quite useless. What I do is I take a 3D scan and I then make a simplified 3D model from that scan, you can always drop the scan into an assembly later for fit checks. When making my simplified 3D model I would also use real measurements (of the thing you scanned) over the measurement you can pull from the surface model if you are after any form of a tight tolerance.

For scanning an engine bay and then modelling up your own engine mounts say - sweet, albeit a bit time consuming from what I know (people send me scans, i don't do the scans so know naff all about that side of it).

 

[James363]

I just read what James wrote above and fully agree. These aren't tools which let you copy parts without a lot of fudging.

One thing which is very annoying (I am quite out of date though) is that most software takes a point cloud and just creates a surface model which I always find quite useless. What I do is I take a 3D scan and I then make a simplified 3D model from that scan, you can always drop the scan into an assembly later for fit checks. When making my simplified 3D model I would also use real measurements (of the thing you scanned) over the measurement you can pull from the surface model if you are after any form of a tight tolerance.

For scanning an engine bay and then modelling up your own engine mounts say - sweet, albeit a bit time consuming from what I know (people send me scans, i don't do the scans so know naff all about that side of it).

We can get ours from points cloud to a surface file then to a solid model, but you do have to fill any holes to make it 'water tight' first. If you scan a cylinder head, you normally end up having to do some fudgery to get the middle of the ports as you can only scan either end.

Even so, the finished file is somewhat 'dumb' kind of like a scanned word document. You can easily read it, print it out and it'll be just the same, but if you want to edit the text that is when it gets more tricky. Flat faces aren't actually 'flat faces' in CAD, round holes are not actually recognised as such, and any edges end up slightly radiused.

Also there are some scans which are damned near impossible to get to turn to a solid model, they just crash the computer instead of processing properly.

Rob's knowledge may be a bit older, but even so today we still don't make anything from scanned files, if we are using the scanner on original parts, we always model it on Solidworks and just overlay the scan to check accuracy. We made a part on the CNC mill once directly from a modified scan, but only to see if it was possible.

 

[botfch]

We use Geomagic design X for all our cad, it’s basically solidworks with a bunch of tools to help convert scan data.
The most useful tool is the accuracy analyser which will colour map the cad to show you what’s in and out of tolerance.

 

[Beauvais Motorsport]

I have an Einscan H which I bought for 4.8k last year, for the price the detail and accuracy is great. It does take some time to setup and learn and some parts can be difficult to scan, even with dots and scanning spray. But different scanners can be better at somethings than others.

@Touring_Rob I want to have a scan of the car.. Its just the prep and other measuring tools to make sure of the accuracy that stops me right now. Scanners not going anywhere though! Ive been putting most of my focus on the machining side of things and researching/studying for the cnc mill.

The inspection plate will be moved once I organise the unit away from the door/shutters, away from the light and draft..

 

[RSRowe]

I have a desktop Einscan SE. Really fancy one of the hand held ones, but they’re bare coin

 

[Touring_Rob]

Tbh I was hoping work would have bought a fancy one by now for me to borrow but no dice

 

[botfch]

Tbh I was hoping work would have bought a fancy one by now for me to borrow but no dice

Just ask the likes of Faro or Hexagon for a demo, the sales guys will fall over themselves to let you use the kit for a few days or a week.

 

[Touring_Rob]

Yes yes, we would like to scan tiny defects in pipes but also an entire car... what model would you recommend lending to me for a few weeks

Good shout though.

 

[James363]

Yes yes, we would like to scan tiny defects in pipes but also an entire car... what model would you recommend lending to me for a few weeks

Good shout though.

Tiny details don't always scan that well, so tiny cracks would probably not show up that well, but if you've got a sample you want me to scan and see PM me, it won't take 5 minutes.
I tried a handheld scanner recently and it didn't pick up tiny details as well as our arm based Hexagon one, but it is obviously way better for scanning a whole car.
I scanned part of a Ferrari 250 Testarossa chassis (a good day out that was) with ours but it was a bit of a hassle as I had to move the scanner a few times, and its quite awkward. We have a 1.5 metre long arm.
We got ours after hiring one from Hexagon for a month for a trial, it's very similar to this one.

 

[botfch]

Yes yes, we would like to scan tiny defects in pipes but also an entire car... what model would you recommend lending to me for a few weeks

Good shout though.

I don’t know what it is exactly you do but you might find your boss is genuinely interest in the kit once they see what it can do.

Always makes me laugh when you see guys measuring stuff by hand and give them a go with the equipment and they're blown away how much faster and easier stuff it is.

 

[BoatNonce]

I don’t have a proper 3D scanner but even the lidar on an iPhone can produce impressive results.

It’s great at stuff like mapping out rooms too, particularly a series of rooms for example. Great if you’re say trying to chase a pipe through multiple rooms/floors.

Doesn’t even compare to the proper stuff but a massively useful tool. For doing proper accurate stuff the proper scanners must be ace.

 

[Touring_Rob]

I don’t know what it is exactly you do but you might find your boss is genuinely interest in the kit once they see what it can do.

Always makes me laugh when you see guys measuring stuff by hand and give them a go with the equipment and they're blown away how much faster and easier stuff it is.

We did have a trial of a faro arm and probe a few years back and it was very impressive.

They have a slightly odd spending mentality, 100k computer no bother, 20k laser scanner ohhhh nooo.

Given until very recently they could have profited from buying equipment through tax write offs they are a bit silly.

 

[Touring_Rob]

I don’t have a proper 3D scanner but even the lidar on an iPhone can produce impressive results.
View attachment 1659591
It’s great at stuff like mapping out rooms too, particularly a series of rooms for example. Great if you’re say trying to chase a pipe through multiple rooms/floors.

Doesn’t even compare to the proper stuff but a massively useful tool. For doing proper accurate stuff the proper scanners must be ace.

I want to use one of these to map my garden so I can design a shed. It's weird that no one even makes a usb c plug in lidar for android 😞

 

[dann2707]

We have a handheld one at work and don't use it anywhere near as much as we expected to. Think it came to about 30k in the end

As others have touched on, the final scan is just kinda pointless until you've mesh to surfaced it.

People not in the know think you can scan a part and then it's suddenly in solidworks with all your dimensions added. It's the total opposite and you basically have to create the part from your scan. On ours you do anyway

Someone scanned a banana the other day and that came out mint.

 

[Louis]

We have a handheld one at work and don't use it anywhere near as much as we expected to. Think it came to about 30k in the end

As others have touched on, the final scan is just kinda pointless until you've mesh to surfaced it.

People not in the know think you can scan a part and then it's suddenly in solidworks with all your dimensions added. It's the total opposite and you basically have to create the part from your scan. On ours you do anyway

Someone scanned a banana the other day and that came out mint.

Id send it back if its making Banana come out as Mint mate

 

[PhillipM]

I want to use one of these to map my garden so I can design a shed. It's weird that no one even makes a usb c plug in lidar for android 😞

Polycam works fairly well just from anything that has a decent depth camera. Often means you end up using the front cam instead of the rear one though.

 

[Beauvais Motorsport]

For the guys in this line of work, I dont suppose you could give a rough estimate on what it what it would cost for a solid model to be made from a scan of these rack housings? Ill supply the scan and some measurements to work off. I'm based in kent.

 

[RSRowe]

It’s a couple of hours work. Is it just a solid model you want, or drawings too?

 

[Beauvais Motorsport]

Just solid, it’s so I csn have the entire assembly modelled in cad for studying/fun and possible future developments. Would also need someone to measure the dp/pa and variables of the involute gear and rack. Found these guys not far from me https://www.thinkscan.co.uk/reverse-engineering-services-uk

 

[RSRowe]

Just solid, it’s so I csn have the entire assembly modelled in cad for studying/fun and possible future developments. Would also need someone to measure the dp/pa and variables of the involute gear and rack. Found these guys not far from me https://www.thinkscan.co.uk/reverse-engineering-services-uk

Will drop you a message