Any manufacturer that has worked with stamped parts for long enough has eventually run into this problem: The parts still work, and the process has adapted to the current iteration. Everything is running smoothly. Years of wear and tear on your suppliers’ tooling, combined with resharpening, maintenance, and small iterative changes have all crept in and legacy drawings no longer reflect the part.

The client’s concern wasn’t about the current tooling; it was what happens next. When those dies finally wear out, whoever builds the replacement set needs to reproduce the part exactly as it exists today, not as it was originally drawn a decade or more ago.

That’s where we came in. Our job was to reverse engineer the parts as built, not as documented, to create a full CAD package including SolidWorks parts, STEP files, and detailed 2D drawings to fully document the most recent iteration of the part.

The reverse engineering process started the way you would expect, with a detailed series of measurements of the part to build a 3D model from. A combination of traditional parametric modeling and sheet metal tools were then used to create the complex geometries of the part.

Validation happened in 2 stages. First, the parts were FDM printed as designed to get an initial feel for how the models stacked up against the production parts. This provides quick validation for the accuracy of the models, but looks can be deceiving. Once the printed and production parts were visually identical, we brought in laser scanning for a more rigorous check, comparing the finished CAD geometry against high-resolution scan data of the actual parts to confirm we’d captured true form at a level of precision hand comparison alone couldn’t verify.

The result was a clean, accurate technical package: models and drawings that describe the part as it exists in production today, verified against the real thing through multiple independent checks, ready to hand to a die builder when the current tooling reaches end of life. No guesswork, no relying on decades-old prints, no surprises during tool tryout.