Museum with vision

Donington Park race track is home to a museum that contains many classic racing cars, including McLaren and Ferrari F1 cars driven by the likes of Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Many of these vehicles are still used by enthusiasts, but this inevitably results in wear and tear, and sourcing spares is no easy matter.

Donington owner Kevin Wheatcroft says: “Many spares are non-standard, high-specification products that were originally made for a specific vehicle. Once that vehicle is no longer in production — effectively every year in the case of F1 or touring cars — the parts are virtually impossible to track down. We have worked out that the only answer is to create a highly detailed CAD image of the part and then supply this to a specialist manufacturer to produce the part for us.”

A very effective way of doing this is white-light scanning, where a ‘structured image’ of the part is projected. The shape of the object can be calculated from a series of images using triangulation — just like a laser scanner but perhaps 10-times (or even 100-times) faster.

Ralph Weir of Phase Vision says: “White-light scanning offers the best of both worlds in terms of speed and accuracy, with the added bonus that many modern systems do not require either expert operators or laboratory conditions to operate effectively. Accurate, detailed scans can be produced in a mater of minutes, or even seconds, speeding up the reverse-engineering process while eliminating the risk of errors.”

Mr Wheatcroft concludes: “We have found that white-light scanning can deliver a faithful representation of the part that we wish to source, and this reduces the risk of errors in the reverse-engineering process. It is invaluable in the sourcing of accurate high-specification spares for our vehicles.”