Hunt Motorsport Developments has brought reverse engineering in-house with a Peel 3D scanner, supplied by Measurement Solutions Ltd (MSL), ending its reliance on customer-supplied CAD files and third-party scanning bureaus. Founder Thomas Hunt, who spent more than 11 years as a race engineer at British Touring Car Championship team Team Dynamics Motorsport, runs the consultancy for British motorsport and the wider automotive sector, covering CAD design, reverse engineering and engineering consultancy work.
The scanner's first major job was reverse-engineering the front end of a BTCC car for a customer who wanted a new bumper and grille, with no CAD model on file to start from. Peel 3, the handheld scanner MSL supplied, is pitched as a step up from entry-level scanners for engineers who need reliable data without the cost of a metrology-grade system. Engineers doing reverse engineering on historic or one-off vehicles will recognize the underlying problem: without digital geometry, every redesign starts as a guess that gets validated, or rejected, by an expensive physical prototype.
That's the bottleneck the scanner is meant to remove. Hunt says fitment checks on new components used to take four or five 3D-printed prototypes before the business had scan data to work from. "Having accurate scan data allows us to make design changes with much greater confidence before producing a prototype," Hunt said. Scan data now feeds straight into CAD, letting the team catch fit problems on screen instead of on the workbench.
The scanner also handles smaller reverse-engineering jobs, including brackets, steering components, suspension parts and mounting features, feeding directly into the company's existing 3D printing setup. Bringing scanning in-house has let Hunt Motorsport Developments take on projects it would previously have outsourced, or turned away, while keeping quality control and lead times under its own roof rather than a scan bureau's.
The bigger change is showing up in the company's historic motorsport work, where original CAD, tooling and engineering drawings frequently no longer exist. Instead of depending on the small number of suppliers that still hold legacy data for those cars, Hunt Motorsport Developments can now scan a surviving physical part and reconstruct it as a digital file, opening up projects on vehicles with no paper trail left at all.
