3d scanning for the marine industry

i am requesting help regarding the purchase of a 3d scanner and/or
digitizer for use in small speedboats, sailing yachts etc (you get the
size). I am very concerned about spending money on something that will
not help me. Does someone know how much accuracy is important, and how
much accuracy can i get, when referring to a 33ft (10m appx) speedboat
hull? i had arleardy proposals for buying imetric, Konica Minolta and
Leica scanners i am not sure though which one i should choose as they
work in different ways and they dont give me the appropriate answers
as far as large object mesh creation accuracy is concerned. Please
note that i already own delcam copycad which from what i read is user
friendly and rather quick in completing meshes. i am also in search
for a designer (CAM) probably a freelance one. Thank you very much in
advance...P Ch.

 

And in the old days they probably used such things
as manual splines .....
Look at the history of shipbuilding.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_(device)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipbuilding

 

Are you trying to duplicate an existing design ? ( I guess so) MAN !! that's
going to be a ton of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for anything that size. Car makers
scan models all the time, but there's quite a bit of post scan CAD, CFD,
etc., work before they're ready to make tooling. I would imagine that the
equipment and sofware they use cost millions.

Today (at least here in Newport Beach CA.) boats are designed in 3D CAD, and
the forms (bucks) are machined on huge five axis routers.

Another thing to think about is accuracy vs scale. An existing hull is going
to have a bunch of geometric errors, even if the form was perfect. These
might be raised or lowered areas as much as .100" or more deviant from the
mean. The scanner is giong to add "this" error to it's own, and you'll have
a bit of a mess to clean up. If you're scanning a CAD/CAM generated form,
you'll do better, but why not just model it ?


Mark

 

If you can get it into a dark shop and have a powerful projector then

http://www.3d3solutions.com/

Ben

 

I use to do 3d digitizing for an automaker back in Detroit. Costs
were rather high back in the late 90's but have dropped considerably.
Depending on what you want to do there are several options. I would
look into http://www.gom.com specifically http://www.gom.com/EN/company/contact/north.america.html
for sales guys. I used to deal with the Capture 3D guys out of Novi,
MI.

Accuracy varies as well, we were capable of 50 micron tolerances,
although a boat hull will require much less. The packages they offer
dump out stl files along with others allowing you to cut from their
datasets. There are several other packages out there that will let
you hone your data files... look into ParaForm, and PolyWorks. I
think both are still around.

Hope this helps some.

Erik

 

Please see www.directdimensions.com for all 3D scanning and reverse
engineering solutions. 12-year experts in all types of projects including
marine, industrial, aerospace, etc. We use all the scanners and all the
softwares so we can either do the projects for you or recommend, sell,
train, and support you with the most appropriate solutions.

By the way - not likely the GOM system is appropriate for a 33ft hull
project. Way to expensive for the accuracy level that you need for the
hull. Call us - we have excellent less expensive solutions. And Paraform
is long gone! PolyWorks is great, so are Geomagic and RapidForm - the trick
is determining which is best for your apps - this is our specialty - call
us.

Michael
--
Direct Dimensions, Inc.
rapid solutions to 3D problems...
410-998-0880 ph

www.directdimensions.com