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When Reverse-Engineering CAD Makes Sense (and When It Doesn't)
Reverse-engineering — taking a physical part or assembly that has no usable drawing and turning it back into an accurate CAD model — comes up more often than people expect. Equipment gets replaced piecemeal over decades, original manufacturers go out of business or stop supporting a product line, and drawings get lost long before the equipment they describe does. When a replacement part, a modification, or a full redesign is needed and the only reliable source of truth is the
Neil Pedersen
7 hours ago2 min read
How BIM Coordination Catches Clashes Before They Hit the Shop Floor
The most expensive place to discover that a duct run and a structural beam occupy the same three cubic feet of space is on site, with the duct already fabricated and a crew standing around waiting for a decision. The cheapest place to discover it is in a coordination model, weeks before anything gets built. That's the entire case for BIM (Building Information Modeling) coordination: bring together the architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing models — us
Neil Pedersen
7 hours ago2 min read
3D Laser Scanning vs. Manual Measurement: Why Point Cloud Data Wins for Retrofits
Retrofitting an existing facility always starts with the same question: what's actually there? Manual measurement — tape measures, laser distance meters, a lot of climbing and guessing — has been the default for decades, and it mostly works, until it doesn't. A missed dimension on a structural column, an as-built drawing that hasn't matched reality since 1998, a beam that turns out to be six inches lower than the drawing says: any of these can turn a straightforward installat
Neil Pedersen
7 hours ago2 min read
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