When you look at a helical shaft, your first thought is usually the spiral. On our latest project, however, the real puzzle was choosing a single “golden” tooth to drive the entire pattern. Every tooth on the scan showed a slightly different wear pattern, so cloning the wrong one would have amplified the error thirty-plus times along the shaft.
Why it got messy ⬇︎
How we cracked it
- Deviation Analysis & Average Mesh Inside Geomagic Design X, we ran a color map on every tooth face to locate the statistically “cleanest” profile.
- Lock the Master Feature That tooth became our unbreakable reference. Everything else was suppressed until it matched.
- LiveTransfer ➜ SOLIDWORKS With one click, the entire parametric tree landed in CAD, ready for synchronous tweaks. A final tolerance check confirmed a watertight solid green lights for CAM and simulation.
Pro Tip: Before you commit, offset the candidate tooth ±20 µm and re-run your deviation plot. If both offsets spike the error, you picked the right master.
Toolbox Spotlight
Try this on your next scan
- Reduce mesh noise first decimation at 0.15 mm closed 70 % of spikes without killing detail.
- Save a version with only the master tooth visible; that “clean seed” becomes a QA baseline months later.
- Always validate the final pattern in context drop it into the mating housing and run an interference check before you send it to the machine shop.
Welcome to Mesh2Model
You’re reading the first edition of Mesh2Model, a brand-new newsletter from the CADfinity team. Each issue delivers:
- Hands-on workflows you can replicate in under an hour
- Tool breakdowns (Geomagic Design X, SOLIDWORKS, NX, and more)
- Real-world case studies that shaved days off the reverse-engineering cycle
- Bite-sized tips, tricks, and troubleshooting checklists
