Make replacement parts faster - with CAD or a 3D scan?

hi you've met me at a very strange time in my life because my toilet's broken and today we're gonna fix it together with technology don't worry there's no grossness in this video because it's just the clean water flush mechanism that's broken there's a little plastic part in here that connects the push plate to the flush mechanism and that's broken off these German flesh boxes are all neatly built into the wall but that means for replacing broken parts you are dependent on manufacturer for still making that one exact part so I thought why not use this as an experiment to see which would be faster simply using cat to drop the part and printing a new one or using 3D scanners to just copy a functional one well is that even how 3D scanners are supposed to be used we will found out together after a message from today's sponsor private internet access I like looking up a window it's a nice view now in summer there's birds out there the flowers are blooming but I don't think I'd want this to 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[Music] hardware setup was quite a bit faster than I remembered it was just one minute 20 until everything was mechanically set up that however changed once I tried setting up the software design scanners require activation licensing and they're pretty locked down and the activation process has always been quite finicky but now after having to register for all the newsletters just to download the software I realized the activation file that I have is not going to work with this current software instead you have to lock your device to an account that it didn't have so far and it's all online all the time now but for some reason their online activation procedure simply wouldn't let me use my scanner it just told me hey the serial number that you're using we don't know that this thing exists I always find the software is just locking me out so debugging that would push me into the day's realm of setup instead of the minutes that I'm trying to get here and that simply wouldn't be fair but it's one of those things that 3D scanners tend to be pretty restrictive about that's just a downside of using an extra piece of like proprietary Hardware in a process you know calibers where am I these nobody can lock me out of these okay let's hope this second one goes better this is the 3D maker Pro links um it's a totally different scanner approach it's a handheld scanner and I'm not sure it's going to have the detail but we're going to try anyway so let's get started and here the longest part of the setup was actually just screwing in the Locking USB cable but with that we end up at the same one minute and 20 second mark I then spent about a minute setting up the part so that I'd have access to it from all sides it needs to be raised off the ground so we can scan the underside as well plugging it in is after booted right up however there is a little problem if you look at the screen in the background here it is not picking up the red part you can see it's kind of Overexposed underexposed but no matter what I do it does not scan it might just be because this is an infrared scanner that it doesn't work with the red I don't know I am going to grab the scanning spray but unfortunately that does mean masking up and wearing some gloves because this stuff does contain some nasty solvents I've tried to add as much random stuff to the area as possible to give the scanner an easier time to track this stuff is sort of like a very light foam dusting on the plants look at it there it is the scanning process itself is rather simple you just orbit around the part a couple times until you've covered all the possible angles in my case I did three separate scans from sort of three different positions that took me about 10 minutes then you take those three scans and align them and combine them into one big data set that takes another five minutes of processing time and then you export that point Cloud into a surface model which is another five minutes roughly so honestly this is actually better than what I was expecting it's picking up all the details even there's a little Ridge right here the knob is pretty okay there is a good bit amount of noise like it looks like there's some some stuff going on at the edges there but overall I think the shape is all right next up I'm taking the scan file into mesh mixer to get it into a printable State now I could have done some of this post-processing in the scanning software directly I didn't do that which resulted in some larger files but doing it in mesh mixer just meant it was a bit easier to do and I had more powerful tools at hand I'm also using the sculpting tools to adjust the shape of the clip area this is an area that any 3D scanner is going to have a hard time seeing into and creating proper geometry so I'm just pushing out the shape there a bit to be more clippy and so far from taking the scanner off the shelf to having a part that we can now start a first test print with I spent a total of 33 minutes so next up I'm gonna try to draw this part in cat and because I was rambling in the original recording here is a voiceover over the voiceover uh what I realized is that really only three features on this part matter and that is the hook the Square Peg and the fin everything else in between really I could just wing it I don't have to measure anything as long as those three features end up in the right spot and are shaped correctly however I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna measure everything exactly I'm gonna draw it exactly just to be fair to the scan so let's get started and do exactly that now most of the features were pretty straightforward Square features that you can pick up with just a pair of calipers but there are some angles on the part that are a bit harder to measure so I traced the part onto a piece of paper extended those lines then gently and then measure the angle of those the total time spent here was 33 minutes and it checked the footage yes it is down to the minute the exact same amount of time I had spent on the 3D scan so both of these parts are now ready to drop into the slicer I did a quick check to make sure they are roughly the same size and they matched up really well which means it's time for a first test print man this input shaping is really speeding things up these days foreign the Cat part and the scan part oh I actually mixed these up that's the cad part and that's the original so obviously you can see that the original and the cat design part um are nearly identical I can put them on top of each other and I use calipers of course so the dimensions are pretty much spot on the scanned part is more like an homage to the original like all the features are there and if you look at the proportions it's a bit wider but like all the all the dimensions should be pretty much there all right let's give this a try okay I'm back from the test fitting session and I did make some discoveries uh first of all I don't want to show you the inside of my flashbox still so I made a one-to-one replica of it and we're just gonna walk through how these parts fit here is the replica of our geometry it is basically just a six millimeter Rod 12 millimeters wide and then you have a bit of supporting geometry around it I added it in as close to the original as I could but really the only thing matters is this rod and how wide it is so taking the original of course this fits on here swivels nicely with no resistance at all taking our CAD part now this does clip on as well but it does bind up and that is because I actually made an error while taking Dimensions off of this and that error happened right here at that little nub at the end of the clip what I did initially is to just extend the circle of the clip a bit and then I placed the circle for the nub right dead center on it and of course that said that makes sense right but if you look at how that interacts with the pivot it's supposed to clip onto we can see that there is some interference so our clip is going to Spring open and it's going to bind instead what I should have done and looking closely that is exactly how the original part does it is to place that knob on the outside so it's tangential with the inside of that Circle so I change that it only took me as long as it took me to explain it to you basically and this cat part is ready for its second revision now our scan part it does fit surprisingly well like I thought this would fit much worse so it does kind of clip on it does kind of swivel it's too tight still overall though it is still too wide and that clip inside diameter is too tight so I'm gonna fix those two things and that brings us to the last thing that I noticed and that's that our part that we were taking measurements off of is also broken I think somebody actually snipped off this this side rod that's supposed to be there so of course I'm gonna add that back in in CAD and this was just a couple seconds because all the geometry is already there that I can work off of for fixing the features on the 3D scan part I tried mesh mixer I tried blender but ultimately I ended up using prusa slicer it doesn't have the most sophisticated tools to modify and work with these meshes but it is very fast and it's very easy to use I couldn't figure out how to do a Boolean intersection so I just use the cut Z Tool and for adjusting the diameter of the clip and for adding that Rod I just added two cylinders and had one as a negative and one as a positive volume overall adding the second revision was about two minutes in the cad model for a total of 35 minutes up to now and for the 3D scan it was about 10 minutes mostly figuring out what the best approach to adding these changes would be so the 3D scan part now at 43 minutes huh [Music] so there we have them both parts now are actually usable they work I had to turn away the 3D scanned one just a bit on the nub that fits into this push rod but overall both of these now work and to answer our initial question which one was faster well it actually was the 3D scan version even though it was quite a different process than doing the cat in CAD really it's one long workflow it's it's pretty flowy once you get into it you take your Dimensions you create a sketch you create a feature and you just keep adding on features until your part looks exactly the way you want to with 3D scanning it's more like a stages process so there's half a different tasks that you have to do in the right order and you have to do every task more or less well between pipe prep between the actual scanning aligning Parts post processing the meshes it's quite a wide skill set that you need to have to get parts that look good so overall I actually enjoyed the cad drawing process more than it did the scanning process I I feel like I have more control with cat and with scanning it's it's more like the hardware and the circumstances decide a lot of what your result is going to be like but also I must note that the part that we're designing is actually pretty well suited to being drawn up in cat it's all straight features it's just linear extrudes really once you have something that is a bit more involved I don't know got these headphones hanging around here these would be a bit tougher to draw in cat even though they're still relatively straight but yeah you know it's curvy so there the scanner would have an advantage when it comes to creating uh parts that are accurate but then the question popped up for me like is this actually how scanners are supposed to be used even because the scan results are okay they're usable but they're not up to the standard of having a smooth surface crisp features this is okay but not super high detail and I think what the scanner is that we have access to at a budget level are more suited towards are creating references creating either a rough scan that you can then import into your CAD tool into Fusion uh and just take measurements off of that or use it as a backdrop and Trace around it essentially or I think what especially these scanners that can do a bit more volume are pretty great at is the way that for example super fast Matt uses his scanners and that is to create a reference environment that he can then freely draw his designs in he took off the wheels he scanned the entire wheel well and all the mounting points and then in CAD he just drew up his own features his own suspension parts right in there just right off of the scan and all the geometry is there I think that is a much better use case for these and for that the quality that you get is way more than enough this is like millimeter accuracy roughly um and for that sort of stuff totally suitable so there you have it two completely different ways of creating a functional identical replacement part while I did prefer the cat and calipers approach you know this thing is pretty good having a scanner at your disposal very useful even if it's not for directly copying apart so as always hope you learned something thank you for watching keep on making and I'll see you in the next one of course I couldn't leave well enough alone so I made a topology optimized flush lever this thing's never gonna break

Channel: Made with Layers (Thomas Sanladerer)

Views: 102,624

Keywords: 3D printing, Tom's, 3D printer, RepRap, 3d scan, cad, fusion360

Id: g41Kyl4Zp8w

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023