Digitizing legacy mechanical components for reverse engineering

Reverse engineering capabilities allows physical parts with no CAD description to be brought into any CAD/CAM/CAE system for subsequent design, analysis and reproduction. Point data generated from most 3D scanners can create geometric representation of legacy components in a fraction of the time of manually inputting into conventional CAD systems.; The workflow process of reverse engineering a legacy component involves data acquisition, file manipulation, CAD model development and reproduction. This paper concentrates on investigating and establishing the methods for digital acquisition and data manipulation of legacy mechanical components. Digitized legacy component, point data sets, from a, were generated utilizing Cyberware Model Shop Color 3D Scanner Bundle. Each point data set was then transformed from a local to a global coordinate system and merged with other manipulated data sets using algorithms developed herein. The manipulation of point data is typically the first task for reverse engineering, so it is important for users to have complete freedom to inspect, modify and clean up the measured data without placing limits on point count or file size.; The manipulated data sets were evaluated on their total point count, point scattering and data voids. A decrease in scan speed and the opening up of the scanner head luminescence lens F-stop did increase the data set point count, but it was only the lens F-stop settings that effected point data set quality.