Cool market for lasers

On the highly competitive Nordic ice lolly marked, it takes more than good looks, sweet flavors and nice price to win market shares. That's why you meet ice lollies in different shapes and sizes.

One of the oldest Nordic ice cream manufacturers is Norwegian Hennig-Olsen A/S established in 1924 with a national marked share of 37% and a net turnover of 400 mill NKR and 240 employed. The company is ISO 9001-certified.

One of their most successful ice lollies is Kaptein Sabeltann, Captain Sabretooth, a lolly with the shape of an old pirate. At Hennig-Olsen in Norway, hundreds of moulds each day shapes out thousands of 100% identical Captain Sabretooth and thanks to a new technique lots of man hours and money were saved in the making of the moulds.

The two sides of the handcarved model were scanned using a Scantech 2-camera 3D laser scanner with a 100 mm scan range. The accuracy of the scan was better than 1/100 of a mm.

The scans were scaled to size, and milling tool paths were calculated to produce a number of graphite electrodes for the spark erosion process. A steel mould was made for casting the aluminum ice moulds. In the aluminum moulds the ice lolly are produced. The backside is an offset surface also made with Scantech's CARSO Copying CAD/CAM