Tim's Motorcycle Diaries is a blog about motorcycle travel, photography and mechanics written by former millwright & IT technician who's now a technology teacher.
This is not your typical motorcycle blog. If you're looking for cruisers and biker life, this ain't that. If you're into thinking about motorbikes in technical, dynamic and creative ways, Tim's Motorcycle Diaries will take you there.
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Sunday 6 June 2021
3d Scanning a Motorcycle
Using a Structure Sensor I 3d scanned a 2010 Kawasaki Concours14 and cleaned it up in Meshmixer:
The Structure Sensor is an old generation 1 device and isn't as high resolution as I'd like, but it gives you a general sense of shape and proportions. Meshmixer is free from Autodesk and does a good job of fixing up voids and missing bits in the scan.
Structure.io came out with a higher resolution second generation model that they offer a discount on if you send in your old one. It might be time to trade up. My dream is eventually to get a 3d scanner that is accurate enough to scan and reproduce old motorcycle fairings that are out of production in order to produce millimetre accurate OEM replicas to keep old bikes on the road with new plastics via 3d printing accurate reproductions.
The next step would be to scan a customer's fairings and offer customized options based on 3d modelling. It would be relatively easy to reproduce high quality copies of fairings with some interesting variations in design. Alternate cooling, MotoGP style wings and even craziness like a motorcycle fairing redesigned with dragon scales of made out of feathers are well within the realm of 3d modelling/3dprinting.
The customized fairing/3d printing direction hasn't been explored yet. Accurate 3d modelling would also allow a micro-manufacturing concern to reproduce the old plastic bits that are wearing out on bikes from holders and brackets to dash pieces. Because they're 3d modelled, this would eventually build a library of out-of-production parts that could keep a wide variety of bikes on the road.