Quote From a Scanned Blueprint. No CAD Model Required.
Scanned print. No model. No CAD. No DXF. We still quote it.
The problem nobody says out loud
Most quoting software assumes a 3D model exists. It asks you to upload a STEP file, and everything downstream depends on that file being there.
That is not what arrives in your inbox. What arrives is a PDF. Often it is a scan of a print that was drawn before the shop owned a CAD seat. Sometimes it is a photo of a drawing on a shop floor. Sometimes it came from a customer who has the model and will not send it.
So the software that was supposed to save you time gets skipped, and the print goes in the pile to be quoted by hand at seven in the evening.
Zenith starts from the print you actually received.
What Zenith reads
- Vector PDFs. Native CAD exports with a live text layer.
- Scanned drawings with no text layer at all. Computer vision reads the geometry and title block directly off the views. A scan is not a fallback case here. It is the normal case.
- Metric and imperial. Both, including prints that mix them.
- GOST and ASME title blocks. Cyrillic title blocks are parsed, not guessed at.
- Orthographic views. Geometry is reconstructed from the views rather than read from a model, because there is no model.
What it does when it is not sure
It flags the part and holds it.
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the opposite of how these tools usually behave. When the engine cannot confirm a depth, or a dimension is missing from every view, or the material callout is ambiguous, it does not pick the likeliest number and put a price next to it. It marks what it could not confirm and routes the quote for review before it reaches you.
A confident wrong quote costs you the job or costs you the margin. We would rather tell you which number we could not read.
Where it is strongest, and where it is not
- Strongest: single machined parts. Milled and turned work, one part per print, with dimensions and tolerances on the drawing.
- Flagged for review: assemblies, weldments, and anything carrying certification or source requirements. The engine will read them, and it will tell you plainly that a person needs to look before the number is trusted.
We would rather be narrow and right than broad and unreliable.
How fast, honestly
You get an acknowledgment in under a minute, so you know the print landed. The itemized quote comes back fast, and a person reviews it before it reaches you.
We are not going to claim instant. A number that arrives in nine seconds and is wrong has not saved anybody anything.
The offer
Send a print you have already quoted by hand.
You know the right answer. We will send back an itemized breakdown, material, machining labor, setup, unit price, and batch total, and you can hold it against the number you already trust. If it is off, we would like to know where, because that is how the engine gets calibrated to real shop numbers.
No portal. No login. No 3D model. Forward the PDF.