Acme Molding Company: Soap Bottle Mold

Situation
Companies working with molds must often make changes to the shape of tooling right on the shop-floor. These continuous improvements are necessary to avoid delays in production due to imperfect manufacturing results. However, these hand-finished changes result in a mismatch between the tooling’s original CAD model and the actual physical mold.

One of the world’s leading liquid packaging firms made shop-floor changes to the tooling of a soap bottle in order to adjust the volume of liquid the bottle holds. They needed to determine where the CAD data differed from the physical mold, and then modify the model accordingly.

You guys are spoiling me – I really can’t explain enough how nice it is, after almost 2 years of delays, to work with a company like yours.”

Solution
Acme Molding Company* contacted 3DScanCo — a division of Laser Design Inc — to scan the mold, identify changed areas, and then modify their CATIA CAD model to reflect the identified changes. Scanning the mold required several steps – accurately scanning the three pieces, assembling them digitally and trimming the excess to capture the negative space. The digital assembly enabled 3DScanCo to extract the actual shape of the bottle from the molds.

3DScanCo used Rapidform to generate a colormap deviation report and a cross section analysis using the overlay of the two models, which visually highlighted modified areas. These inspection reports gave 3DScanCo the data needed to make the appropriate revisions to Acme Molding’s CAD data.

Results
Laser Design Inc and 3DScanCo’s scanning services provided Acme Molding with exactly what they needed – an updated CATIA model that reflects the shop-floor changes their customer desired. Acme Molding’s only practical alternative to 3D scanning would have been to redesign the tooling – a solution that risks having a different shape and volume of bottle.

3DScanCo’s services empowered Acme with a cutting-edge way to solve their engineering problems, offering high quality results with little risk. Impressed with the project’s results, Acme Molding continues to work with 3DScanCo for all their scanning, inspection and reverse engineering needs.

* Actual company name has been changed.