(00:10):
Welcome to the T.REX Shop today. I want to introduce you to my favorite tool that we have here, and it's not the biggest or the most powerful or the most expensive. It's not even the one that I use the most often, which is probably this ShopBot router over here. I wanna tell you about my personal favorite tool, which is the one that has saved us the most time and has helped us to create probably the best quality products out of anything else that we have invested in. And that is the Einscan 3D scanner right here. Now what it is is a pretty complex piece of hardware up here. This thing contains two cameras and a projector. And then on this stand here, we have this little turntable, which is where we place the object being scanned. So for example, if we wanted to scan this SIG P 320 X5, we would simply place it over here on the scanner, and then to kind of stick it down in place.
(01:18):
Competition sights are awfully slippery. There's not much to the software. Basically, you just set a brightness level for the scans. This is what those two cameras are seeing right here. This works much better in the dark. So let me kill the lights and start scanning. Now there's a bunch of different ways to do 3d scanning. The most common is photogrammetry where you take a whole bunch of pictures of an object at different angles and the software magically figures out what 3d object is being represented in all those pictures. Then there's laser scanning and structured light scanning, which is what this is. The projector is projecting a pattern of light a grid onto the object. And then the two cameras on either side of the projector can see the way that that grid is distorted by the surface and can figure out what exactly the contours of that surface should be. Now, as the object turns on the turntable, scanning more and more of the handgun from different angles and trying to piece all of those together.
(02:42):
Now, the reason why having really accurate 3d model is important is because when we cut a mold on the CNC machine, we need that to fit perfectly the dimensions of the actual guns, so that when we vacuum form the kydex on top, we end up with a holster that can perfectly fit the weapon and or weapon-light combo that we're trying to support. You know, back before we bought this 3d scanner, we had to do things the old fashioned way, like our forefathers did putting our digital calipers directly on the thing that we wanted to measure. Getting precise measurements for the slide is pretty easy, but modern firearms have a lot of little curvy bits and it's hard to know exactly where you put the calipers, like where's this radius actually start, where do I put that? And how do I get this little bit here?
(03:36):
Where do I measure from, and where does it actually go to? That's why it's so handy to have the computer model, because we can get very precise measurements off of every single one of these points. And there's millions of them all over the object that we can go by to figure out exactly how we need to build our 3d model. And all of that has really helped us to save a ton of time before we had the scanner and I was building 3d models with the calipers, it would usually take us, you know, five, six revisions before we could get something that worked. And now it's like two or three. The measurements that we're getting from the scanner have really shaved down our pre-production research and development time. However more than that, I think that it's also really improved the fit and retention of our holsters because you really wanna be able to maintain friction on certain surfaces, avoid certain other surfaces, have that stop in place, but also be able to get some adjustable retention on certain objects that are really hard to grab, like the sides of this weapon light right here.
(04:45):
The 3d scanner has helped us to do all of that, not just quicker, but probably better overall. So we might as well turn this into an Einscan-SP review. Since when I was thinking about buying this, I couldn't find too many of those. Would I recommend for people that need this kind of 3d scanning? Absolutely. But it's very, very specific what it can actually do. The hardware is quite good. The software is really problematic. I'd only use this device. If you have the ability to rebuild the model completely in another piece of software, which I do. And we can talk about that in another video. It has a bunch of features that I'm not using, and those additional features are not very good.
(05:25):
For example, we're scanning everything just to get the geometry, no color, no textures whatsoever. And the scanner can do that. It's advertised as being capable of that. And it is capable of that, but it's just so slow that yeah, you really don't want to do that. And you need to be in an even darker room than when I turn the lights off to make those colors look good. Another thing that you can do theoretically, is take the whole thing apart and move it around to scan objects that are not on the turntable, but boy, we have not gotten that to work very well at all. You need to use little registration stickers on the objects so that it can reference it from different positions. And once you do that, it just is so time consuming and so hard to get the alignment, right. That I would not consider that a feature at all. If you need that capability, you really need to be looking for a better scanner that can do that specifically.
(06:25):
And there's a bunch of them out there. They just cost more than this one, but if you need accuracy. If you need micron level accuracy, or if you need to be able to scan down to a few thousands of an inch to get these dimensions exactly right. To get these curves. Exactly perfect. Photogrammetry doesn't work for that. And a lot of the larger, faster scanners don't really work for that. So I think that this scanner would be helpful to you if you have the same requirements that we do. And hopefully this video is helpful to you. If you're looking at investing in a 3d scanner for fairly accurate work. And if this video was interesting to you, just because you wanted to see more behind-the-scenes T.REX Shop work, then subscribe and stick around, cuz we're gonna have some more videos like this.