I'll have to share this next week at my tiny, 20-person shop.
We have a machine shop and an engineering group. ISO9001/AS9100 have stringent requirements about CAD models and print lifecycles and document management, which frequently add friction. We've got engineers who are good with their hands and could build most of the designs themselves without committing anything to CAD, and machinists/fabricators who are smart and could probably design most of the things they're building without needing a print to work towards.
It's only the formal communication layer in the print release process which forces us to have accurate drawings of the things we've made and have to think through the whole design before putting a piece of steel in the mill.
Why don't you invest in some 3D scanning equipment/software. Build the physical object or close to it, then scan it and tweak it in software, doing the whole process backwards.
I mean the problem with software is we dont do that.
I've been in so many businesses where a piece of software is turned over with almost no documentation and a partial API spec. Like, thats like a quarter of a blueprint with "do the needful" written on one corner.
We have a machine shop and an engineering group. ISO9001/AS9100 have stringent requirements about CAD models and print lifecycles and document management, which frequently add friction. We've got engineers who are good with their hands and could build most of the designs themselves without committing anything to CAD, and machinists/fabricators who are smart and could probably design most of the things they're building without needing a print to work towards.
It's only the formal communication layer in the print release process which forces us to have accurate drawings of the things we've made and have to think through the whole design before putting a piece of steel in the mill.