Kaman Aerospace Corp., Moosup, CT

Kaman Aerospace provides airframe structure details of large parts for manufacturing. In order to do this, they have to take engineering drawings, which are created without dimensions, and turn them into drawings with accurate dimensions which can be used in the manufacturing process.

Kaman Aerospace was digitizing mylars with 42x60 Calcomp digitizing tablets. With large parts, this process didn't work, because they were looking for more data than they could digitize in a timely fashion. As scanning is more time effective they looked at scanners. However, because at first they couldn't find a software that could calibrate the scanned image effectively, the remaining solution seemed to be a large flatbed scanner, but unfortunately such a scanner was prohibitively expensive. As a result specialists from Kaman Aerospaces continued to search for a software suitable for use with a lower cost roll-feed scanner, but none of the software that they found had an accurate enough calibration. Then IDEAL presented the WiseImage software to them. They saw WiseImage scanning and its accurate calibration capability, coupled with an IDEAL/Contex scanner, at a price they could afford. This cost-effective solution with accurate calibration nearly sold itself. So Kaman Aerospace decided to buy WiseImage for Windows.

To solve the problem Kaman Aerospace did several steps. First, they scan a drawing and deskew it. Then, they save it as a TIFF file for archive purposes, in case they need to go back and refer to the original. Then, they crop out the area they need to work with. They work with a 10x10 grid system and calibrate to those points. Then they vectorized and export the result as a DXF file, which they open in a 2D CAD application and draw over it.

Their specialists emphasize that the accuracy of the calibration in WiseImage is better than in any other software they tried in comparison. Generally, they save time by being able to scan rather than table digitize. Kaman Aerospaces save money because they were able to purchase the less expensive roll-feed scanner rather than a flatbed with high accuracy. Moreover, fewer working hours are required to them to transform each engineering drawing into accurate manufacturing drawings.

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