topic Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

TMC.Engineering — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 15:41:23 GMT

I am a little stuck on how to proceed and could use some suggestions. I have a fanblade (missing a blade) that I laser scanned and I would like to reverse engineer a model of it so I can build molds to reproduce the part.

The process so far:

1. Laser scan existing part.

2. Cleaned the STL file using Autodesk Memento

3. Exported it as a obj quad mesh.

4. Imported into Fusion360 in sculpting

5. Convert quad mesh to Tspline

6. get sections from Tspline loft new surfaces

This is where I am looking for ideas....

How can I extend the loft to finish off the blade. or is there a better way to get there.

some pics and the model.....

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

TrippyLighting — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 16:21:38 GMT

I now this is bot answering your quesiton but...

After scanning I am not sure I'd have put the stl through Memento as you'll loose some precision dong that. I'd have taken the STL right into Topogun or Blender/RetopoFlow and retopologized right on top of that stl mesh.

The resuting high fidelity quad mesh I'd have imported into Fusion 360 and I'd be mostly done and much quicker than with your approach.

However. IN order to connect that blade through the center part of the fan, you just ned to create another loft profile "in" the center part and connect it to your existing blead loft.

then you'd simply use Modify-> Combine with the join option to combine these into one solid body and perhsap use a filled on the sharp edges created by the join operation.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

PhilProcarioJr — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 16:32:42 GMT

@TMC.Engineering

I agree with @TrippyLighting on this one Momento is not the best choice here, I would have definitely used Topogun on this, it would have been way more accurate and would have only taken a few min. The results would be perfect and quick. If you post the stl I can show you the results you would get if your interested. Not to say you couldn't do this in Fusion alone but it would be a lot of wasted time and effort.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

TMC.Engineering — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 17:04:24 GMT

Thanks for comments, I had never heard of topgun. I will check into it.

Attached is the STL Data

Thanks again

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

TMC.Engineering — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 17:16:43 GMT

This is what the fan is suposed to look like.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

PhilProcarioJr — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 19:56:34 GMT

@TMC.Engineering

I left all the different meshes in there, T-Spline, Solid, Mesh so if you need to modify it, then it should be easy.

Let me know if you need anything else.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

PhilProcarioJr — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 21:09:37 GMT

@TMC.Engineering

Sorry about the scale issue I was working in different units and the scan wasn't very good this file should help you more.

A couple of things you need to keep in mind:

Your scans need to be as good as possible, this one is pretty bad.

The orientations needs to be flat.

The center of the part should be at the origin.

I will work on this some more to give you better results.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

PhilProcarioJr — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 21:45:42 GMT

@TMC.Engineering

Ok this was bugging me so I figured it out, here is the file I don't have time to make a video right now but hopefully I can some time tonight.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

TMC.Engineering — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 13:53:48 GMT

This was really helpful wish I could give more kudos

@PhilProcarioJr Thanks for the effort, I really appreciate it.

@TrippyLighting Thanks for the Topogun tip I will look into it more.

Re: Reverse Engineer Fan Blade

PhilProcarioJr — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 14:26:36 GMT

@TMC.Engineering

I just hope you can see the steps I took from stepping through the timeline on the file I gave you. It was actually a very simple process and you can tweak it as much as you need to.

Your thanks was more then enough for me, if you need any more help or you need me to make a video let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If this solved your problem could you mark it as an accepted solution? Thanks.

Cheers