Taylor Attachments
Taylor Attachments, a UK-based manufacturer of tractor headstock conversion brackets, has harnessed an Artec Eva 3D scanner to facilitate the reverse engineering of legacy equipment.
As well as designing and producing headstock for the national agricultural and commercial industries, the company frequently receives pieces of equipment from its client base which no longer function properly and are in need of restoration.
In the past, Taylor Attachments has taken to manually drawing these parts with pens, pencils, callipers and rulers, before prototyping and making secondary alterations. It is a process that could take the company up to three weeks to complete – as long as 12 hours for the initial drawings and then days and weeks of prototyping, cross-referencing and double checking.
Taylor Attachments
Going through Artec’s Gold-Certified Reseller Europac 3D, Taylor Attachments has introduced Artec’s scanning technology into its workflow, integrating the handheld Eva scanner to bring the time it takes to produce a digital model down from weeks down to a single day.
“With Eva, it takes only about 20 minutes to scan an entire headstock, then another 20 minutes to post-process everything in Artec Studio, and after that, the 3D model from Studio is sent over to our in-house design team,” commented Mark Taylor of Taylor Attachments. “What they do is use the Xtract3D add-in for SOLIDWORKS to create a beautiful, highly-precise 3D model that’s 100% ready for protection.
“After that, it’s immediately sent over to one of our laser cutting partners, all of whom work to the highest standards. What we are looking at in terms of individual project time with Eva? Everything from start to finish in less than 24 hours. That’s it. Compare that with the seven days to two to three weeks it took us when we were doing it the old way. There’s simply no going back for us.”
