Reverse engineering architectural hardware

Abstract

There is a need to reverse engineer architectural hardware, with hinges and brackets being typical, for use in the restoration of buildings in which the original hardware is damaged. Another use for reverse engineering of architectural hardware is to take existing hardware and modify its design for use in future construction. The capture of the geometry to be used for the reverse engineering of the architectural hardware was developed with a hinge and an angle bracket being digitized. After digitization the hardware examples were transferred into parametric solid modeling software. In the solid modeling software a simple animation, the swing of a hinge, is shown. An illustration of modifying the texture of the hinge is shown by simulating its rusting using the solid modeling software. An angle bracket that was digitized and turned into a parametric solid model was converted into an STL file. This STL file of the captured geometry for the hardware was transferred to rapid prototyping machinery and a prototype was developed to illustrate the modeling of existing hardware. The parametric solid model of the angle bracket was transferred to a CAM package and a model of the hardware was turned into CNC code. The code was sent to and cut on a CNC machine tool creating a duplicate of the item. © 2007 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. All rights reserved.