I was hired by Jon Jacobson Engineers to help to design and document the engineering. Dr. Jacobson was the engineer when there was a fire on the Blue Train and because of this experience was hired to do the engineering on both the Red and Blue cars. The damage was very extensive to both cars, and required massive rework. One problem was that quite a few of the doors were torn off. The original door manufacturers were contacted and could not provide the doors in the require time frame. So I was assigned to reverse engineer the doors.

We did not have original door drawings, but we had a couple of door installation drawings. Both of these drawing showed a slightly different configuration for the doors. These were paper drawings. Dr. Jacobson had the drawings scanned and converted to the DXF format. I was quite surprised at the accuracy that we got from the scan. I could actually use the graphics in my new design. I brought the DXF data into Keycreator and proceeded to create the doors. (See the images below) Keycreator is truly the best tool to take confusing 2D installation drawings and converting them to solid models, by allowing you to pick and chose the graphics necessary you can easily create the new parts. With Keycreator you are not limited to having the sketch contain only the graphics necessary to create the solid, like a parametric/history based CAD systems.

Since we didn’t have the door drawings we also had to do an extensive physical study of the doors. We disassembled one of the doors and I took the parts and started to work. There was a complex mechanical interface between the doors and the cars. The doors are operated by a pneumatic system. I created most of the components of the door in Keycreator and then translated them to Ironcad to start the mechanical design. Reverse engineering is basically two steps. First you create the basic configuration. Then you make sure the parts fit and provide the functionality and look for ways to enhance the original design, after all it was design over 40 years ago.

As you can see from the images below I was well on my way to create the new doors or at least have a place to start to create new options on a new more improved design. The project was about 55% done when management decided to take the project to a company in Kansas to finish the job.

This was a fun and interesting project. The renderings and drawings were generated in Ironcad.

If you have any engineering needs, please give us a call at 206-623-1403