I was recently looking into purchasing a 3D scanning device for my company. We had a need for it in one of our departments, and I had heard from other businesses in the industry that it was worth the money to purchase one.
However, I quickly found that the machine was not only very expensive, but it would cost me even more money to train my employees on how to use it, as well as to keep up on its maintenance. Before making any rash decisions, I went ahead and made a list of the cons and pros of owning my own 3D scanner, as opposed to simply outsourcing my needs to a company that specializes in 3D scanning.
One of the main advantages that I found was that the laser was non-contact. Non-contact scanning allows fragile parts to be measured and makes the coordinate locations especially useful to CAD/CAM systems where surfacing through true surface coordinates is desirable. The process is extremely fast and it is highly accurate.
It allows me to take complete coverage of the part. The laser’s high resolution and thinner beam permit scanning highly detailed objects where mechanical touch probes may be too large or inconsistent to accomplish the task.
The process has been proven to be highly accurate. It is very repeatable, so unlike mechanical touch probes, it can be an advantage for my business.
It is also a Windows bases system, which makes it compatible with our systems. We use Windows at our business, so that works out perfectly. Overall, I was able to find numerous advantages for our business because of the laser. I decided that it was in the best interests of my company to further pursue purchasing this device.
The aspect that impressed me the most about the laser was the speed of the process. According to the company’s website, there can be real world scanning speed of thirty thousand to forty thousand points per second. Depending on the situation, some objects may need to be scanned at slower speeds, but other can be performed at the max scan rate which is close to two hundred twenty-five thousand points per second.
In all recorded cases that I have researched, laser scanning tends to be significantly faster than a CMM, and it is somewhat faster than a mechanical tracing system. Although there were many advantages to purchasing a 3D scanning laser, we made our final purchasing decision based on the speed of the device. Because we could look at things faster, we could be more efficient.
