Take a seat in 3D

IMARC, designer and manufacturer of office chair components and mechanisms, has upgraded their scanning abilities for its engineering and design department with a new 3D scanner setup.

The new equipment was supplied by Kreon: an Ace measuring arm, mounted with a Zephyr II Blue scanner. The compact, tripod-mounted arm, with a maximum length of 2.5m, means that it could not only be placed quickly, but can be moved around easily as well.

For IMARC, a company that uses a range of design methods from CAD, to hand sculpting, to additive manufacturing, a blue light scanner vastly improves the production process, as all of these methods are compatible with the new system. Another important feature is that older models of IMARC, for which no CAD designs exist, can now be reverse engineered with relative simplicity.

A specific application mentioned is “designing ring-shaped backrests which are composed of two pieces (front and back) that must align perfectly. The back piece is known to deform during manufacture (deformations due to the open shape, identical over the entire series of injected parts), hence it is scanned after production. The CAD model of the front piece is then adjusted to the actual, scanned shape of the back piece. That way, despite deformation in the back piece, no defects are visible after assembly.”

The Ace arm is compatible with both probes and 3D scanners, but one task for which blue light was chosen over a probe is that an optical-based scanner can accurately digitise soft materials such as the foams and fabrics used for seats.

Whether it’s for rapid prototyping or inspecting injected plastic parts, the Head of Technical Department, Michele Rausse is glad for the investment: “The Ace arm is a high-performance, versatile piece of equipment that meets all our measurement needs. Hard to see how we ever got by without it!”