Rapid Mould and Die Making Using Reverse Engineering and Rapid Prototyping

CAD technology is a means to provide a consistent flow of data throughout the whole development cycle of a product. However, in industrial practice physical models are widely used to represent the shape of a product and to optimize this shape manually. Therefore, in many cases CAD data are not available and a computer based description has to be derived in order to obtain data for manufacturing a mould. This can be done by using a Reverse Engineering system. It comprises an optical 3D digitizing device and software to process the measuring data. CNC milling and rapid prototyping (RP) facilities provide means for manufacturing a mould based on the CAD data created. The paper presents R&D activities on a complete process chain in mould and die making. This process chain has been established within a distributed manufacturing alliance of several mould and die makers that was based on modern high-speed telecommunication