As CNC machining improves, will it be easier to reproduce old designs?

[MatthewVanitas]

A goodly number of companies seem to be reproducing old designs these days, with the Italians taking the lead on Western gear, USFA moving towards early 20th C. autos (early Colts, Woodsman, etc), and other odd little things popping up.

Is some of this due to advances in CNC machining? Are we getting closer and closer to the point where a good example can be "scanned" part-by-part into a machine, and fresh parts needing a minimum of machining to fit produced?

If so, if the tech gets better and better, will it become more and more possible to do small "botique" runs of unusual pistols, especially as demand outpaces supply on long-defunct guns.

Why do I ask? I kinda want one of these:



Of course, a new one of top modern metallurgy that won't wear out so fast would be great, and a new one wouldn't have historical value, so I could muck around with it without "ruining history."

So, will technology start bringing back select old guns, just as DNA tech keeps promising to revive mastodons?

 

[Diamondback6]

It could, if the capital-investment were there--or you found somebody willing to work his butt off transcribing the original drawings into a solidmodel (as opposed to AutoCAD wireframe) to create .IGS CNC instructions from...

 

[Mr.510]

CNC Machining, CAD, and "Part Scanning"

I have 20 years full time experience in CAD part design, CNC programming, and machining. It is now possible to "laser scan" a 3D part and end up with a CAD model.... but unless the part is some crazy free-form, multi-blended variable radius shape it's faster, easier, and cheaper to measure it up and draw it manually. The model you get from a laser scanner is far from perfect and requires a ton of CAD work to "clean it up" into something usable. As an example, I could measure up a 1911 slide manually and create a 3D CAD model in about four or five hours... at $100 an hour. A laser scan would be about $600 and I'd still have to spend at least a couple hours cleaning it up. Another six to eight hours of programming, setting up, and cutting soft jaws or other tooling and we could be making chips. There is a great misconception outside the machining/programming world that you can just send a 3D model to a machine and it will make the part. At this point in technology, with the best programming software available, a programmer has to specify every cut with every tool. There are features in the software that let you just pick the shape you want to cut and it will figure out the roughing and finishing paths, but there's still a lot of input required by the programmer. I think we are a very long ways from getting software that can figure out how to approach a part and what tools will cut it most efficiently.