Problem: Costly delays in production
The Huey Helicopter. Primarily built for the U.S. Marine Corp.
The manufacturer needed to switch production of the helicopter’s cabin to another plant.
A set of templates is used to assemble the helicopter. Five hundred templates in all and there was only one set. No documentation existed on the templates design. Templates ranged in size from four inches to four feet.
The goal was to make the switch without an interruption of production. A second set of templates was required.
Current process was to create a set of CAD template models would cause months of production delay with a cost of a half million dollars.
Enter the use of a Konica Minolta Vivid 9I 3D Laser Scanner
3D Scans were made of each template at the production facility. CAD models of the templates were then created from the 3D scan data.
Result: No helicopter cabin production time was lost to create the digital template copies
Months of lost production time didn’t happen. Half a million dollars was saved.The company loved the cutting-edge 3D scanning process to create the digital template copies. A permanent set of models for the templates is now available.