Applications 3D

Toy Reverse Engineering

Our customer is a seller of old toys. He wanted to start producing old ack-ack burp action toy guns. This mainly involves creating a mold to manufacture the plastic handles of the toy gun. Applications 3D was called in to help scan and create a mold CAD for production. Toy reverse engineering is not as simple as it may seem. Once the toy is open the inside could be a lot more intricate than its exterior design.  Using a band saw we were able to slice the handle directly in half. This provided us with full access to scanning. Turns out everything on the inside could be mirrored for the CAD models. This is not always the case but since each side is identical it will greatly reduce the time to reverse engineer this toy. To scan this part we used our Comet 5 white light scanner. This scanner is very accurate which will lead to a more accurate final product. With one half scanned the reverse engineering process begins. Using Geomagic design direct, which is a 3D modeling software, a near mirror image of the physical part becomes a CAD model. The CAD models were 3d printed in nylon material to match what the final product will look like. The plastic tube was added and everything functioned correctly.