Let’s walk through the process:

1) After you’ve imported and aligned your nominal and scan data, create a section profile by going to Insert>Section

2) After you’ve created a section, you can export it as a DXF file. Right mouse click on the section entity in XOV’s feature tree, then select Export from the drop down menu.

In the export pop up window, set Export Section As to 2D, and choose AutoCAD DXF as the export format.

3) Open the DXF file in your CAD software, where you can make a draft or scaled print out.

One such interface is for Pro/E Wildfire. With the Pro/E interface, you can open the PRT files from Pro/E directly. The advantages of this are the high fidelity of opening the exact data, right from Pro/E. When a CAD file is saved in a neutral format, some information can be lost or miswritten. To avoid the possibility of these common errors, XOV can open the PRT files directly, thus removing any chance of file interoperability issues.

Pro/E Wildfire uses a numbering convention to store revisions to it’s files. An example would be a file named: Example_Part.prt.1. This would be the first revision, hence the number one. As changes are made to the part, Pro/E stores each revision with a accending numerical identifier. Such as Example_Part.prt.2 and Example_Part.prt.3

This revisioning is very useful, however, XOV can not process the file with the indentifier at the end, as it is treated like a file extention. Much like Windows does not think a *.1 file is a Pro/E file, neither does XOV.

The solution to this inconveniance is simple. In Pro/E, Save a Copy of the part you want to inspect. Perhaps save it in a directory with the scan data and XOV file. After the file has been saved, use the Windows Explorer or comperable program to navigate to the file, and rename it to *.prt from *.prt.1

Now, XOV can open the Pro/E file directly using the Pro/E interface.

Measuring the thickness of an object like a propeller has generally been a tedious process that is difficult to repeat consistently.

The traditional thickness measurement process goes something like this:

1. Mark each blade to define cylindrical (or conic) cross sections
   1. 
2. Using a flexible ruler, measure several points along each cross section (top and bottom), marking each one
   1. 
3. Using calipers, measure the thickness at each marked point
   1. 

As you can see, there’s a lot of room for error and individual variation between parts and inspectors.

Solution

Using a 3D scanner, you can scan these same parts, and then set up Rapidform XOV to automatically measure thickness (among other things) and generate a report for each part. Using these technologies, the process is 100% repeatable for every like part.

Here’s how the process works with a 3D scanner and XOV:

1. Scan the part. (There are a variety of scanners available; you can find pricing and accuracy info on rapidform.com’s 3D scanner info page)
2. Open the scan data in XOV, and create offset cylinders/cones that will be used for measurement
   1. 
3. Create section curves from the cylinders/cones, and then set the measurement points along the curves using “Add thickness deviation pattern”
   1. 
4. The software reports the thickness values for each requested location
   1. 

Note that once you’ve defined the cylinders and measurement points on a given part, every like part after that can be inspected with just one operation. You can also set up a trend analysis report to aggregate the results of several part inspections and look for trends.