Stackmaster Engineering Corporation
Summary: How Stackmaster Engineering Corporation uses Rhino in design and development of manufacturing systems.
Stackmaster is an engineering driven company whose primary focus is the design and development of manufacturing systems for the aircraft industry. Until recently, all our design work was done on 2D CAD software. We had used 3D software in the past, but found it cumbersome and more time consuming to work with than 2D. This was especially true during the early stages of a project, when ideas had to be drawn up and changed fast and often. Eventually, we stayed with 2D entirely.
A few months ago, when we needed a few 3D images for a presentation, we turned to a friend to draw these for us. Instead, he introduced us to Rhino.
Remembering my past experience and the lengthy learning curve involved, I was not prepared to spend that kind of time again. More importantly, we needed only those few images and we needed them soon. My friend convinced me, however, that I could very quickly learn to use the Rhino modeling software well enough to generate the images I needed. He helped me get started and I was pleasantly surprised by how intuitive Rhino is. Since then, using Rhino, we have created many images for our presentations, our brochure, and our website.
Even though Rhino was meant to be a modeling software, we are now using it for some of our design work. Four factors led to this:
- the ease of use
- Rhino can communicate with AutoCAD and lets us work 2D drawings into 3D models without having to redraw anything
- the ability to dimension in Rhino
- the feature that lets us generate 2D drawings from the 3D images
The more I work with and learn to use Rhino the more I understand its capabilities and see the potential uses for it in our company.
Manufacturing engineering and designing machinery is all about function. Seeing a total manufacturing system in a rendered 3D model on the computer screen and the ability to rotate it gives us another way to look at the appearance as well as visualizing work flow within the factory environment.
Gerd Bode, President
Stackmaster Engineering Corporation