Oh what a relief it is!

[Brady Watson]

John,
On a project this size, Z-level roughing is a necessity. There's just too much force on the long cutter to forego the roughing pass. At 1st glance a roughing pass seems like a waste of time...when in reality, if the bit could take the force without serious deflection or breakage, you would have to run it at a very slow rate...and the cutting would actually take longer & the finish quality would suffer. You can get away without roughing on smaller & shallow reliefs. Most of the time roughing only takes minutes & saves a lot of time.

Scanning...yes...This is a essentially a digitizing service that I offer to those who cannot afford a professional laser setup. This is a unit that I designed around industrial laser sensors and it is the result of over a year of R&D. The hardware is not for sale or available. The service however is. I've scanned everything from a giant ice cream cone to musical instruments and customers send me things from all around the world. Many of my customers have Picza, NextEngine and even Scantech units, but need a higher resolution relief, something that their equipment cannot do. I really don't want to get into the CMM equipment business, but I do offer high resolution scanning at a very affordable rate. If you need scanning you can forward me pictures of your model for a quote. At the moment I am putting together a dedicated laser rotary scanner, which will scan 5-sides of a part in one go. This will be ideal for those who need models for the indexer, or multi-sided parts.

Don't throw away your touch probe! You can still scan 2D patterns and shapes with it!
I used the SB probe for years & it is an excellent way to get into digitizing on a shoestring. I started getting more digitizing work than the SB could handle (time/speed) so that's when I began researching lasers.

-B
PS- Here's a pic of the ice cream cone. It was about 6" in Z.


19353.jpg
19354.jpg

[jseiler]

Can you give us an estimate on how much you would charge for digitizing the snow cone so we have an idea of whether or not we could afford this? I do very little for pay, but occasionally people ask me for things like this (and a guesstimate of cost). I've not any reference points to even make an estimated guess. I'm sure there are others who would like ballpark figures.

[Brady Watson]

Please contact me off list for pricing on laser scanning.

-B

[rookie432]

Brady,

Fantastic work. Impressed with your scanner.
I have the nextengine laser but havn't delved all the way in yet. The Resolution issue seems to have been a result of some software but that seems to keep improving.
Again I love your shield relief. Awesome.

Bill

[kaaboom_99]

Brady,

Thanks for sharing. Once again, you truly are an inspiration to those of us "coming up".
Your work and abilities are a benchmark for me to test my own mettle to.

Now, if I could only figure out how to price my work so I keep busy.
There has to be a book somewhere! :^)

[Brady Watson]

Thanks for the positive comments guys. It was a lot of fun to do & a neat conversation piece to have on one of the shop walls.

-B

[myxpykalix]

I assume the texturing was a seperate toolpath? How much extra time did that add to the project and do you think it was worth doing or would a non textured surface look ok? Are you going to paint or finish this in any way?

[Brady Watson]

Jack,
The texture was part of the 3D scan & resulting toolpath. There are other ways to add texture via 2D (XZ or YZ) strategies, but I just cut the file as it come off of the laser...which was limited to the detail that a 3/8" ball could cut. A 1/4" would pick up much more detail at the expense of time...but I could have also just isolated higer detailed areas only to do those parts with a smaller bit as well.

-B

[jhicks]

Very Nice Brady! The possibilities are endless.

[foamcarver]

Very nice-what kind of digitizer do you use? I like the icecream cone. You do some AWESOME work

Nikki