Case study 4 - Legacy Products - Re-Tooling

When Bosch Lawn & Garden needed to remake the tool for one of its lawnmower grass boxes - designed in the days before 3D CAD technology and rotationally moulded in a hand made tool for the past 20 years - they asked En-scan, through Minima to scan the design using its portable, 3D scanning device – the first of its kind in the UK.

Through working on previous projects with En-scan, Bosch knew that rather than manually measuring the component and generating CAD data, they could build CAD surfaces around an STL framework of scanned information. Without such 3D data, modern Rota-moulding techniques such as cast aluminium tooling would not have been used in the redesign process.

En-scan’s scanning and data manipulation took five hours enabling Bosch to use the set of STL triangles files to build the 3D geometry of the box using Pro-Engineer CAD software.

To allow the highest level of resolution to be applied to a large component (of approximately 800 mm x 600 mm x 600 mm), multiple files were created, one for each 250 mm cube section of the grass-box.  Because these files shared the same origin, they assemble as a single component when imported into 3D CAD so the creation of multiple files was crucial.

En-scan’s Nigel Blair explained that the scanner is ideally suited to rotationally moulded components due to their geometry and size.  The large radius curves, flat surfaces and line-of-draw geometry allows for fast data capture with high levels of surface completeness.

www.boschgarden.co.uk