Back in 1996
I got the crazy idea to model my own Shovelhead in CAD, that was
pretty much the beginning of this website and what would later
become my company DBBP-Design. This year I invested in a better
3d laserscanner and thought it would be fun to see how much better
I would be able to do it with better tools and more experience,
(but far less spare time haha) So this will be version 2.0!
The new scanner is an Einscan Pro 2X with an "Engineering kit" which consistes of a turntable and a tripod to mount the scanner
The best surfaces for scanning are non reflective and not black.I put the parts on a back background to prevent capturing the background in the scans. The aluminium was glassbeaded which was perfect!
Even at the lowest resolution the scanner captures way more points than needed, the 2 pics above are scanned at the lowest resolution, after which the point file is simplified to 10% of the points
What you
then have is still several hundreds of thousands of points which
are connected by small triangular surfaces called facets. The
file format is STL which is the same format you would use for
3d printing. Then starts the long process of postprocessing, which
is basically modeling the whole part in CAD using the facets as
reference. I usually remove the parts of the facet file that have
been postprocessed to make the model "lighter" and faster
to work with.
This was
a while ago already, and I have already finished doing the crankcases
and scanned a set of cylinderheads, but I only just got around
to doing a writeup. Part 2 will follow later this week, the sun
is shining and I am going for a ride now!
