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Laser Scanning: Clone Your Best Car & Make It Better

Every racing team has a No. 1 car. It runs faster and handles better than the rest of your cars. Your best car may vary according to the track where you’re racing. It doesn’t matter. You wish all your cars could be exactly like your No. 1 car. Laser Scanning makes the wish a reality. By using the cloud-of-points technology to form images that can be seen from all angles and dimensions, it creates specifications for your car accurate to within 1 millimeter.

The Scanning Process

If the car has been painted with anything other than a flat primer, it is coated with a spray on talcum powder (similar to baby powder). This gives the laser scanner a surface which is much easier to see. Next the car is given some geometry to ensure an accurate scan, this is usually done with lumps of modeling clay. The scanner only scans a small section of the car each time and those scans are then registered together. Since a car is made up of relatively flat faces, the clay gives the registration process some geometry to line up from scan to scan.

The car is then placed on a level plate to give a good ground reference and an attachment is added to each side of the roll bar tube. By scanning these along with the car, two cars can be lined up together with a common reference. Not all bodies are hung on a car in the same fashion, so having another means of reference is important when comparing the differences between two. At this point the entire outside of the car is scanned. To scan an entire car will usual take anywhere from 75 to 100 scans. This process takes about 3 or 4 hours to complete.

If you’re only looking to have a record of or to replicate your top cars, the laser scans only the top and sides of the car. If you plan to gain even more of a competitive edge by using Computational Fluid Dynamics, the laser goes on to do a total scan, including the bottom of the car. During the scan, the laser collects between 20 million or more points which are then used to build a CADCAM blueprint that can be used to replicate your car or that can used to identify and evaluate the differences between your car and another scanned vehicle. All told, the process takes a little less than a day – about a half day to scan, with setup and takedown taking the rest of the time. The CADCAM file will be ready to be shipped or handed to the customer within a few days.

Identifying & Evaluating Differences

Once two vehicles have been scanned, the surfaces can be placed on top of one another to quickly and accurately discover all differences. The picture above illustrates this process.