Diving equipment manufacturer converts drawings with Scan2CAD raster to vector

Midland Diving Equipment manufacture and supply the finest diving equipment available  Midland Diving Equipment manufacture and supply the finest diving equipment available  Midland Diving Equipment manufacture and supply the finest diving equipment available
Midland Diving manufacture and supply "the finest diving equipment available". (Images provided by Dreamstime.com and Midland Diving Equipment Ltd.)

When Leicester (UK) based Midland Diving Equipment Ltd contacted us about upgrading to Scan2CAD v7.5, they expressed satisfaction with Scan2CAD, saying that it had proved "very useful". They were also pleased to discover that as users of the current Scan2CAD version 7, they could upgrade to the latest release, v7.5, free of charge.

Midland Diving Equipment are distributors and suppliers of watersports, snowsports and extreme sports equipment, clothing and accessories. Their showroom displays a variety of sub-aqua, diving, snorkelling, snowboarding, wakeboarding and surfing equipment, including power and surfing kites.

Founded in 1957, Midland Diving Equipment Ltd was initially a distributor of Bristol compressors. Since introducing their own Whirlwind range that has given excellent service to divers, fire brigades, the military and industry, they have become one of the UK's foremost manufacturers and suppliers of diving equipment, high pressure valves, filtration, charging and pure air technology.

In 1971 Midland Diving became the UK distributor of US Divers. This, combined with the development of their own MDE valves and manifolds, gave thousands of commercial, military, sport and leisure divers throughout the world the opportunity to use the finest equipment available. Expanding to larger premises in 1976, Midland Diving continued to diversify with the development of high pressure systems for racing teams, movie special effects companies and precharged airgun enthusiasts.

Roger Ellis, Midland Diving's technical sales director, said "At that time we generated engineering drawings by the drawing board and technical pencil method. Today we have about 150 legacy drawings ranging in size from A4 up to A0 in size. We needed to transfer these somehow into digital files that could be modified by CAD software. This is where Scan2CAD came into play".

By purchasing Scan2CAD Midland Diving have been able to automatically convert scanned images of their technical drawings into DXF vector files for editing in their PC CAD program, in their case TurboCAD.

"To date we have converted about 15 to 20% of our drawings, mainly the smaller sized drawings. We have had a few teething problems as we have gone along but we have received invaluable help when needed from Andrea Tribe on Softcover's support desk. I am not aware of any other software of this type that can do what Scan2CAD does at this price. I can thoroughly recommend Scan2CAD" said Ellis.

Midland Diving bought Scan2CAD v5 in 1999 and have upgraded twice, first to v6 in 2000 and then to v7 in 2005.

For further details about Midland Diving, see www.midlanddiving.com.

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