Need help- scanning car body to make wooden buck

Hi

My friend found his "dream" car that he has been searching for decades , its a fiberglass sports car from the 1950s.

The owner is willing to let him scan it . but what is the best way to do it ?

my friend is willing to pay a few $1000  to  have it scanned but who can do it ?

and is the Faro arm still the scanner of choice ?

The owner of the car can probably be talked into taking the car to a studio if needed . 

And once you have it scanned . what file format do you need to edit into the file to cut the plywood forms for the buck ?

My friend knows it a big job , but he has worked at fiberglass shops and fab shops all his life .

Thanks for your ideas 

We are in the Los  Angeles area .

These days the scanners are all contactless hand held units. You will likely need to place marker stickers randomly all over the areas to be scanned and if it is too shiny something will need to be done to make it more matte. Oddly enough, aerosol athletes foot spray powder is the item of choice since it doesn't damage the paint and is easily removed.

Every scanner I have dealt with spits out a proprietary file format that must be converted into something solidworks or Fusion can understand. This takes a lot of computing power when it is something as big as a car body and in high resolution.

Then to make the interlocking buck shapes you need someone to sit and do it in CAD, You will need to decide what spacing you want and where you want the nodes to be. We have yet to find any software package or plug in for this task. I keep a local guys number that I hire to do it. 

It is a solid week of work.  If you find someone that will do it for a grand let me know. The knowledge for the buck is really specialized. Few people have done that. Luckily my guy worked at Revival and Rivian and had experience and was willing to call my coachbuilder to find out where the critical points are.

Thanks for the info , another buddy had a car scanned about 6 years ago and it was $5000 , so I just figured it would be a little less now , 

I understand the file size needs to be huge , does it help to just do one side down the center and just flip it over to the other side ?  The original is not the same anyway from side to side.

Cheers

Out of Huntington Beach

NPO Design - Body Scanning

I have nothing to add except that this is cool and I really want to know what car you guys want to scan :)

It has been a while since we scanned a whole car. Half will be fine. When we clay model a car we only make half of one anyway. 

It is the door jams, sills, window channel grooves, vents, louvers, style lines, ect that need the higher resolution.

In reply to Trent :

Why do it the hard way?   Put a few good coats of wax on.  Spray it with PVA ( it washes off. 
  Then make a splash mold. 
        Once it kicks off take the splash mold apart  and you now have the ability to make exact fiberglass replicas.  No translation errors.  

frenchyd said:

In reply to Trent :

Why do it the hard way?   Put a few good coats of wax on.  Spray it with PVA ( it washes off. 
  Then make a splash mold. 
        Once it kicks off take the splash mold apart  and you now have the ability to make exact fiberglass replicas.  No translation errors.  

I do not think the owner would allow that...

my buddy worked at a shop that made funny car bodies , if that was possible he would have already done it.....

I wonder if you could get good enough resolution to at least have an ok starting point using an old Xbox kinect?

Kinect  seems like a neat idea , but getting it to work seems to be a problem , 

I have a couple of them  but never really saw a HowTo that I understood !
 

People have also used the latest iPhone which has Lidar , but again with mixed results .

We would really only need the outer body shell shape and window and door openings ,  not all the details you would need if you were trying to do a production car.

In reply to californiamilleghia :

If you were to give him assurance that no damage to the car or paint? ( that's the purpose of the wax and PVA)  plus a splash mold can simply be torn off. 

californiamilleghia said:

Kinect  seems like a neat idea , but getting it to work seems to be a problem , 

I have a couple of them  but never really saw a HowTo that I understood !
 

People have also used the latest iPhone which has Lidar , but again with mixed results .

We would really only need the outer body shell shape and window and door openings ,  not all the details you would need if you were trying to do a production car.

Decent overview of possibilities here: