Scanning cars’ secrets for posterity

Imagine if you could digitally scan an entire car so that, if the worst happened, you’d have a pattern ready for its re-creation…

WE LOVE OLD-SCHOOL technology in our old-car world, a world mostly centred on an era unvisited by digital electronics. Calculations were analogue, threedimensional shapes were produced and measured physically and not always accurately. Two worlds, then and now. The heart says they should stay as separate as possible. But maybe the heart is shooting the messenger, for technology should do only what we want it to do.

The pictures you see before you show worlds not colliding, but meshing. What is happening is that an icon – yes, why not use that word here? – of the early 1960s, as shapely a construction as can be imagined, is being digitally scanned in such detail and to such accuracy that the icon can be recreated to dimensional perfection. Should the National Motor Museum go up in flames and Bluebird CN7 be consumed, the data here gathered could help create a replacement. It wouldn’t be the original record-breaker but it would be the very next best thing.

Now, if the Bluebird can be scanned, so can your own classic car for which no new panels are available. Technology is your friend. But how does it work? And how can technology be so stunningly, infuriatingly clever?

Look again at the pictures. The Bluebird is lit, the background is dark, and there are several rather surreallooking white spheres placed around the vision of curvy blueness. There’s a tall tripod and flashes of red light. And a man is doing things on a laptop computer on the screen of which is an image of the Bluebird, except it’s green.

The man is Stuart Brown, founder of and brain behind 3D Engineers, the first company to scan cars in this way