Despite the growing sophistication of digital design tools, if you go into any automotive design studio, you’ll still see clay models. While more products are starting in the virtual world, eventually designers need to touch, feel, and see physical representations of their work. The challenge is bridging the digital and physical design worlds. Several companies offer mills that can cut clay blocks into representations of 3D digital models. However, if designers alter the clay – adding more weight to one feature, carving a bit away from another – those changes don’t flow back to the virtual design. Some studios use hand-held scanners or coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) to capture those changes, but each can be a time-consuming process.
Drew Shemenski, president of metrology equipment supplier Wenzel America Ltd., in Wixom, Michigan, says the solution is a closed-loop system that can create the clay models and capture changes that designers make. Wenzel equipment achieves that by combining clay milling capabilities, with the scanning and measurement tools of a CMM. So, the same machine can convert a raw blank of clay into a representation of a physical design, then capture any changes made to that model.
“There are two types of milling for clay models – CMM-based or traditional. With a traditional mill, it’s always been a one-way process. You’re translating the 3D digital design into a physical representation,” Shemenski says. “By adding a CMM to that, it becomes a two-way process. You create that physical model from the digital design, but then you can capture changes to that clay model.”
He adds that the clay design tools came out of Wenzel’s CMM business. The company had been selling CMMs to design studios, and on a visit, engineers talked to designers about the challenges they faced. Setting up a clay model for scanning was a challenge, often requiring designers to move the clay model onto special fixtures – a step that risked damaging fine details that had been painstakingly carved into the designs.
The initial goal of adding the milling head was to eliminate those setup steps. Engineers achieved that by developing a high-precision milling head, then beefing up motors, drives, and power systems in the CMM so they could handle the weight and energy draw from the milling equipment. Engineers then added features to software tools to create the digital-to-physical-to-digital pathways.
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From the March 2017 of Today’s Motor Vehicles.