Project News & Case Studies

Many industries are now benefitting from the increased speed of 3D laser scanning to significantly reduce the time required for product development, functional analysis, and inspection of their products.

The hot new iPad and iPhone products have caused a big stir in the consumer electronics market. As with any new electronic device, scads of new accessories appear with little lag time to serve the early adopter customer base. The aim of being first to market with these accessories means that these companies urgently need quality 3D data fast.

The company is known for repairing, overhauling, and restoring radial aircraft engines of World War II vintage for cargo fleets, fire fighters, militaries, nostalgia operators, collectors, and museums throughout the world. With many decades in the business, the company’s engineers provide expert workmanship and advanced overhaul equipment to keep radial engines safely in the skies. They have also expanded into parts manufacturing and QEC assembly.

Donnelly Custom Manufacturing Company, based in Alexandria, MN, is a leader in short-run injection molding. With over 200 employees, Donnelly sets the standard of excellence in custom injection molding by delivering exceptional service and solutions to help their leading industrial OEM customers succeed.

The guitar maker (luthier) began making custom guitars in the late 1970s. He made an especially ornate one-of-a-kind electric guitar body in the early 1980s. Many professional musicians had played it and given it rave reviews. The luthier decided that he wanted to document his classic creation and create an updated version based on his 20-plus years of experience in the guitar making field that could be produced in limited quantities with computer numerical controlled (CNC) machine tools at a local woodworking shop.

Laser Design, Inc. and FARO Technologies (NASDAQ: FARO) announced their partnership in developing a next-generation scanning technology system, the Magnaline 240. This strategic partnership will allow both companies to bring their combined technologies to a wider base of innovative customers.

A major manufacturer of high-tech bicycles, in their ongoing quest to improve the efficiency and aerodynamics of their bikes, has been testing them in a wind tunnel since 2000. The goal is to improve design to reduce drag, so the same amount of power will create more speed and better air flow.

GKS Global Services recently celebrated 29 years in business by completing its 20,000th project.

In 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) kicked off a project called the Vehicle Design Summit (VDS) which today has grown into a large international consortium of teams from universities and innovative companies seeking, amongst other pressing global needs dealing with energy and transportation, to develop a vehicle that dramatically reduces energy, materials, and toxics used in vehicles.

Implementing a Laser Design SURVEYOR 3D laser scanning system purchase into your R&D process may permit a $100,000+ tax credit in the first year!

New releases of Geomagic Studio and Geomagic Qualify, the leading reverse engineering and inspection software for Laser Design bring unparalleled ease of use to the market for 3D scanning software, along with powerful new features that improve results and save time.

Time Compression Technologies explores: What do you do if you have a die or mold that was made long ago and you don’t have any computer-aided design (CAD) data for it? What do you do if you have a model that was crafted by a sculptor and you’d like to use it for a product?

The capabilities of GKS Global Services spans the gamut from high-accuracy 3D laser scanning to 3D CAD model creation to product design and development to testing and analysis. This project for an optics company involved all of those phases – full engineering services to bring about a successful product launch.

Manufacturers in every day and age have jockeyed for the coveted first-to-market position in introducing their ground-breaking, innovative products to the public. Today more than ever, speed and quality give product manufacturers the competitive advantage. Reducing time to market creates the biggest opportunity to increase bottom-line profitability.

Laser Design Inc. announced that Schneider Electric has recently made four installations of Laser Design SURVEYOR™ 3D laser scanning systems in its international network of manufacturing plants.

A mechanical engineering firm was contracted to install new cooling equipment in a municipal ice rink’s mechanical room. The challenge was to design the equipment install without tearing out the old equipment first and to install some elements and piping that housed the refrigerant around the current equipment configuration to limit downtime of the facility when the cooling unit was actually disconnected.

Laser Design Inc. announced that Carley Foundry recently installed a Laser Design scanning system using the FaroArm in its Blaine, Minnesota facility.

In an effort to streamline their verification process, a well established foundry turns to GKS to perform 3D laser scanning on castings.

Litigating in the aftermath of accidents is big business in the U.S. today. The costs of the lawsuit system are estimated to be several billion dollars a year. With such large sums of money riding on the outcomes of lawsuits every year, tools are needed to insure that the cases are decided correctly and fairly...

Laser Design announced that Bountiful Baby® has installed a Laser Design SURVEYOR™ WS Series 3D laser scanning system in its factory in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Kimberly-Clark, the well known company with brands such as Kleenex, Scott & Huggies, needed to determine if a capital investment in larger diameter embossing modules is needed instead of the current embosser...

The customer, a manufacturer of gas pump parts, needed a 3D CAD model of a cast part in order to reverse engineer it. The part was created before 3D CAD models were common, so its only documentation consisted of a 2D drawing. The part had complex geometry and an internal cavity.

Laser Design, Inc. announced that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has installed a Laser Design SURVEYOR™ WS Series 3D laser scanning system in the Materials Reliability Division located in Boulder, CO.

Laser Design Inc., the leading supplier of 3D laser scanners for over 20 years, announced that Schneider Electric recently installed a Laser Design-FARO arm laser scanning system in its Cedar Rapids, Iowa facility. The system will be used for verifying plastic injection mold tooling prior to production runs.

Valador designs and builds information architectures for strategic planning, engineering, analysis, and management of highly complex systems. Valador’s services include visual and model simulations utilizing game engine technology.

The customers were several suppliers of a multinational company with locations in the Far East and the USA. The casting was to be scanned and inspected to make sure its tooling produced the same exact part and the same quality wherever it was being fabricated.

Ask GKS’s veteran metrologists what is the most unusual scan they have ever performed and they can’t give you an answer—they can give you many!

Laser Design Inc., the leading supplier of 3D laser scanners for more than 20 years, was named one of America’s fastest-growing private companies by Inc. Magazine for the third year in a row.

By purchasing a new 3D scanning system from Laser Design, your company could save thousands off your 2009 tax bill.

The majority of marine vessels that are in service today do not have digital documentation or CAD models. Despite the fact that vessels under construction today are being designed based on 3D data, they suffer the same lack of documentation of their true as-built geometries.

The customer, a supplier for a large company, wanted to make sure his tooling for one of the parts he supplied matched the original CAD which was created many years earlier. Because of their age, the molds were somewhat worn.

The customer was an established maker of fine spirits, with a distinctive (and very complex) glass bottle design. The customer’s glass bottle mold was damaged and needed to be replaced. Due to its old age, no digital data existed for the complex and detailed bottle so they were unable to make repairs to the original mold in CAD.

You have a carefully crafted clay prototype made by a top design artist. Each detail is exquisite and you want to make sure every last one is molded into the finished article. How can you quickly and accurately digitize your intricate free-form shape and then fabricate it on a condensed timeline?

Today’s marine technologies encompass work in the fields of transportation, merchant markets, and the military, as well as underwater exploration, offshore drilling platforms, and high-speed and pleasure crafts. Under their umbrella are the most complex mobile structures in the world, and millions of people’s lives and livelihoods depend on them.

The customer was designing an improved aftermarket supercharger from the external casting of an old OEM stock supercharger, for which there was no CAD model.

GKS Global Services announced that is has changed its name from GKS Inspection Services to reflect the broader scope and range of GKS’s service offerings and worldwide locations.

GKS Marine Services offers laser scanning for marine applications. 3D scanning for marine applications, also called long-range scanning, is a ground-based technique for collecting high-density 3D data to create digital models of complex entities such as seagoing vessels, offshore platforms, ships’ systems, vintage boats, and other big structures and locations, both inside and out.

Dentistry’s roots date back to prehistoric times when the practice consisted mainly of tooth drilling and extractions. Today dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons need advanced technologies to support their advanced care of the teeth, gums, and supporting bone structures.

Laser Design Inc. announced that its next-generation line of 3D laser scanning probes has a new member, the SLP-500.

When you think of "Medicine" what comes to mind? An emergency room full of accident victims? A researcher curing diseases in the developing world? Or just getting rid of your own annoying low-back pain? What you probably don’t think of are high-precision non-contact scanning technologies.

Offshore oil production facilities provide tremendous dimensional control challenges throughout their entire lifecycle – but there is a solution.

A company developed an initial prototype of an anti-snoring device based on many years of research in the field of dentistry. He designed and created a functional device that comfortably and healthily helps cure snoring.

GKS announced it is now offering daily, weekly, and monthly rentals of FARO portable measurement equipment, including the market leading FARO laser tracker.

GKS announced that the company’s Detroit-area metrology lab is now registered for the export and temporary import of items that are regulated by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and is now eligible to perform metrology and reverse engineering services on defense articles that appear on the United States Munitions List

GKS Inspection Services announced that it will be opening service bureau offices in Buffalo/Niagara Falls, NY and in Los Angeles, CA in 2009.

GKS Inspection Services announced it is now offering daily, weekly, and monthly rentals of FARO portable measurement equipment, including the FARO LS-880 for long-range scanning projects

The Challenge: The customer wanted to scale up a one-of-a-kind aircraft concept model to build a large flyable remote-controlled replica. However, no CAD data or blueprints existed for the aircraft model.

Laser Design and GKS welcomed Giles Gaskell to its Michigan team as the Business Development Manager. Gaskell is one of the most experienced professionals in the 3D scanning industry, having worked internationally on projects with many of the world’s leading manufacturers since 1995.

Today large-scale 3D laser scanning is a viable alternative for surveying sites and structures like never before.

The Challenge: Create a CAD model of a free-form model tugboat hull to be remanufactured. The original hull could not be damaged because it was the only replica available so making a mold from it was not possible. A CAD model was the only alternative that would allow for manufacturing an accurate mold.

One issue that has been common in reverse engineering scanning projects for all industries over the years is making sure that customers know exactly what type of CAD file deliverable they want from GKS based on what they will be doing with the data and their budget.

GKS Inspection Services has expanded its roster of capabilities to include Computed Tomography (CT) scanning services and systems sales, which are available at their locations worldwide. High-accuracy CT scanning enables 3D scanning of parts with very complex internal geometry.

Turbine blades are everywhere and present a difficult challenge to their manufacturers: How to accurately produce and maintain their complex free-form surfaces and convoluted shapes. Enter 3D Laser Scanning which is highly automated and insures consistency and quality of the data obtained.

GKS laser scanned several specimens of dung beetle horns for an entomologist who is seeking a method for accurately calculating the volumes of these tiny items. Eventually the scientist hopes to scan over 50 dung beetle horns to determine how much energy goes into producing them, presumably improving that beetle’s chances of passing on his DNA.

GKS Inspection Services has opened a second Pune office in the heart of the industrial zone of Bhosari specializing in onsite dimensional inspection and 3D laser scanning projects using a FARO Platinum CMM arm and Laser Design laser scanner.

A company that designs and fabricates active-function artificial finger prostheses for partial finger amputees contacted GKS Inspection Services about doing scans of two small hand casts for which they were creating prosthetic devices. The devices are body-powered, light-weight, and allow users to regain complete control of the flexion and extension movements of an artificial finger.

Laser Design Inc. has announced the latest version of its 3D scanning software, Surveyor Scan Control, Version 4.4 (Build 4.4.030.) he long awaited release includes hardware and software developments that have been through extensive testing.