Philadelphia Racing Products
PRP final product.
Since its inception over 30 years ago, Philadelphia Racing Products’ (PRP) has not only grown substantially but also increased its product diversity. The automotive parts manufacturer has not only expanded its operations to include designing and manufacturing high-performance automotive racing parts, but it also has a custom work division.
Experiencing a demand increase for its custom projects, PRP Co-Owner and CEO, Richard Schonberger, realised that the company needed to improve its efficiency levels, especially regarding its product design workflow.
Schonberger revealed, “For our reverse engineering projects, our engineering team used to take part measurements by hand with tools such as callipers, micrometres, height gauges, and gauge blocks. Then, they verified the measurements by printing out paper templates. This method was both a time-consuming and tedious process. To keep up with the growing demands from our customers, we need to find a better solution.”
About Philadelphia Racing Products
Philadelphia Racing Products
Philadelphia Racing Products' race car.
PRP is an established high-performance aftermarket automotive parts manufacturer that was first established in 1991. The company was founded by Julius John Schonberger III, who was passionate about street and performance racing. After spotting a gap in the market, he shifted the company’s focus from selling ready-made parts to designing and manufacturing automotive components.
Three decades later, PRP now has a thriving performance engine division which works alongside its comprehensive racing parts manufacturing facility. The founder’s sons, Richard and Jay Schonberger have gone on to continue their father’s legacy.
Scan to CAD helps improve workflow efficiency
PRP splits its product design work between reverse engineering pre-existing parts and designing products from mating parts. Difficulty in obtaining accurate measurements of complicated parts, ensuring assessing clearances, and providing proper fitment and mating of assemblies and other components are just a few key challenges that the company has been facing.
“Nowadays, whenever the subject of reverse engineering or design is brought up, you’re more than likely to talk about 3D scanning as well,” continued Schonberger. “Exploring the Scan to CAD approach for product design and development seemed like a promising route for our business to scale.”
Mesh data captured by a 3D scanner is then imported into reverse engineering software or a plug-in to create a professional CAD model, the Scan to CAD approach captures millions of surface measurements from a physical object.
“Our engineering team consists of Chase Evans, our Lead Engineer, and Guy Porter, our Design Engineer, who are both experienced users of SOLIDWORKS. We were looking for a reverse engineering software that would act as the bridge between our 3D scanner and our preferred CAD software,” said Schonberger.
PRP then reached out to GoMeasure3D, which provided the company with a live demonstration of KVS’ Mesh2Surface for SOLIDWORKS. The reseller outlined the product design and development workflow benefits to PRP, which won the automotive parts supplier over.
The automotive part manufacturer found that combining SOLIDWORKS native tools and the Mesh2Surface Scan to CAD toolset was the way forward. Chase Evans, Lead Engineer at Philadelphia Racing Products explained:
“Some designers and engineers prefer standalone reverse engineering software. However, as an experienced SOLIDWORKS user, I found it more practical to perform reverse engineering all within one CAD software package. Mesh2Surface as a plugin works perfectly well with SOLIDWORKS by allowing me to access a comprehensive set of advanced reverse engineering tools. With this seamless integration, I can fully harness the potential of both platforms, significantly enhancing my product design and development workflow in multiple ways.”
Philadelphia Racing Products
PRP utilises SOLIDWORKS.
The PRP team went on to detail its favourite features that helped enhance the company’s reverse engineering projects, including:
- Accurate fitting algorithms.
- Primitives, planes, and cylinders are easy to extract.
- More manageable and efficient reverse engineering processes.
- Percentage points utilise visualisation to ensure they are within the tolerance of the reference mesh.
- Users can align mesh by reference.
- Multiple cross sections can be taken, and the solution also utilises the ‘Fit Sketch Entities’ tool to extract SOLIDWORKS sketch entities to the cross sections.
- 3D meshes can be pulled into an assembly and can be reverse-engineered.
“Heading the design of new products, I believe that simplicity, precision, and innovation are at the core of design and development. Mesh2Surface’s utility provides sustainable accuracy in our designs and has a dramatic impact on the efficiency of our workflow,” said Guy Porter, Design Engineer at Philadelphia Racing Products.
Key benefits of the Mesh2Surface software:
- Captures an extensive amount of data through the scanning process, allowing for easier design changes later on.
- The ability to handle an extensive amount of data without compromising on quality.
- Limited human interaction, resulting in a minimal risk of unintentional errors.
- Optimised reverse engineering capabilities.
- KVS Mesh2Surface will provide ongoing support to ensure the user can make the most of the software.
Mesh2Surface improves efficiency, usability, and productivity levels
After the company adopted the Mesh2Surface solution, PRP found that its engineering team could now directly design a mating part without having to utilise a roundabout approach. This saves the automotive parts supplier a significant amount of time.
“Mesh2Surface for SOLIDWORKS significantly improves our design and product development workflow, particularly in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Thanks to this Scan to CAD solution, we now have more time to focus on our core designs and create the best high-performance automotive racing products for our valued customers,” said Schonberger.
Evans went on to add, “Mesh2Surface has been instrumental in helping our team overcome many challenges. Previously, we had to first model the existing component before we could even create the mating part, which ultimately is the product we want to design and manufacture.”
Now, PRP believes the company is “designing better products,” having adopted this new approach, engineers can also “fully trust the reference measurements captured by our 3D scanner.” Evans went on to add that the company is also seeing “significant efficiency gains” in product design workflows, with design time reduced by around 25%.
Additionally, the Mesh2Surface developers were also complimented on their responsiveness and feedback. Evans explained, “The ability to interface closely with the product development team at Mesh2Surface is great. I once gave my feedback on a new feature I thought would be useful. The following week I downloaded an updated version of the software, and it was right there.”
As well as the platform's usability, support, and time-saving qualities, PRP also complemented Mesh2Surface on its value. Evans commented, “We get a lot of functionality for the price. Our team particularly appreciates the simplicity of Mesh2Surface–it gets the job done without the complexity.”
Schonberger concluded, “It's fantastic that we achieved our goals by using Mesh2Surface for SOLIDWORKS. We've successfully transformed our product design process through 3D digitisation, allowing us to streamline our workflow instead of relying on conventional manual methods as we did before. We're excited to further expand our operations with this overhaul of our reverse engineering design workflow. Now, we can handle more projects, serve new clients, and tackle extremely complex design tasks.”