Almost nothing we reproduce arrives with a drawing. It arrives as a part — usually broken, sometimes just worn — and the first job is turning that physical object into something we can print from. That's 3D scanning, and it's a different skill from the printing itself.
Why we don't print straight from a scan
A raw scan is a mesh: hundreds of thousands of triangles describing the surface as it actually was, warts included — sink marks, mould flash, thirty years of wear on a mounting tab. Printed as-is, you get a very expensive copy of the same weak point that just failed.
Instead the scan becomes a reference, not a file we send to the printer. We rebuild the part as parametric CAD on top of it — clean surfaces, correct wall thickness, and any known weak point deliberately reinforced.
SHIPS 3–5 DAYS
The switch housing shown above is a real example — a broken sample scanned, cleaned up and rebuilt as parametric CAD rather than printed straight from the mesh.
What we need from you
- The part itself, or as many pieces of it as you have. A scan of two broken halves is enough to rebuild a whole part; a scan of nothing is not.
- One or two reference measurements — calipers across a known feature, or a ruler in the photo if you're sending images instead of shipping the part.
- Any surviving surface detail — logos, texture, casting marks — if you want them carried into the rebuild rather than smoothed away.
Mesh to model
Once scanned, the mesh gets cleaned (holes filled, noise removed, symmetry restored where the original had it) and then rebuilt as solid CAD — surfaces, fillets and wall thickness defined properly rather than approximated from the mesh. This step is why a rebuilt part can be reprinted years from now without rescanning, and why we can strengthen a known failure point without it looking different from the original.
When scanning isn't the right tool
If a part is small, simple, and you can give us accurate measurements directly, we'll often model it from those measurements instead — faster and just as accurate, and it skips a step. Scanning earns its keep on complex or organic shapes where hand-measuring would take longer and be less accurate than a scan.
Have something worth reproducing? Send us photos or read how this played out on a real car in Restoring a Golf MK2.
