Lancia Appia Case Study

Lancia Appia classic car contemporary picture.

Lancia Appia GTE damaged classic car body 3D scanned by 3D Engineers. Section buck made from data.

Badly damaged Lancia Appia GTE aluminium body about to be laser scanned by 3D Engineers.

Lancia Appia GTE scan data point cloud post-processed into polygons and CAD by 3D Engineers.

Lancia Appia GTE damaged classic car body 3D scanned by 3D Engineers and mirrored to check symmetry.

Lancia Appia GTE front end 3D CAD created in Solidworks, using surfacing techniques, by 3D Engineers.

Lancia Appia GTE front end 3D CAD created from laser scan data by 3D Engineers.

Lancia Appia GTE classic car egg crate buck, created from scan data and CAD by 3D Engineers.

Lancia Appia GTE egg crate buck designed, manufactured and assembled by 3D Engineers for Thornley Kelham.

Lancia Appia GTE new aluminium body created by Thornley Kelham using a 3D Engineers buck.

Damaged to Perfect via 3D Engineers’ Process

Egg crate buck created from 3D scanning a damaged and rare classic vehicle. A multi-stage process involving numerous skills, software and hardware. Result enabled the restoration of this car to be completed with less guesswork and more effectiveness.

3D scanning a car is often presented as a complete solution. It isn’t. There is the white noise between the scan and the result – a delivered and fully assembled buck for the body maker. In this case, the damaged car had differences positive and negative across the symmetry line. Fixing the body surface required mixing and matching car body areas to make something workable. Aware that even 4mm away from a car surface can create a terrible CAD surface, 3D Engineers worked to maintain curvature and original design features. A section, often known as ‘egg crate’, buck created from this much-improved surface delivered on time and to budget. The quality of the result speaks for itself.

A damaged classic car requiring restoration

The difficult stuff: otherwise known as 3D Engineers’ stock in trade. In this case, dealing with a damaged car with some areas good, others almost OK and the remainder, terrible. Tragically, the good and bad areas were on either side of the symmetry line, such as it exists on an older hand-built vehicle.

How do you approach this problem?

This automotive conundrum required knowledge of car manufacturing through time. Awareness of key hard and soft points and mixing and matching techniques to attain the required goal of a workable section buck were just a few things required. As usual, 3D scans and a blend of software techniques were used to draw another successful conclusion from this example.

The product proves the success of the project

The buck was delivered and earned another testimonial. The body was created with an immense degree of skill by a traditional body maker, and the end client ended up with a superb restored classic car.

Damaged to Perfect via 3D Engineers’ Process

Get in touch