Primary Designs, a Thame, Oxfordshire-based exhaust manufacturer that supplies Formula One teams and hypercar builders, has brought portable 3D scanning in-house with the Creaform HandySCAN 307, supplied by Measurement Solutions Limited (MSL). The move replaces a development process that once required two or three engineers spending up to a week on a customer's vehicle before work could even begin back at the workshop.
John Salisbury, of Primary Designs, said one of the last projects completed before the switch "required three of our highly skilled employees for at least a week to build one system." With the HandySCAN 307, he said, "I can go and scan the vehicle in a day and complete the rest of the development in CAD."
Engineers who build bespoke systems for rare or immovable vehicles will recognize the constraint the scanner removes: heritage and low-volume cars often cannot leave a customer's premises, so Primary Designs previously fabricated first-development parts on-site before hand-building a jig at the workshop. Now a single engineer captures full vehicle geometry during a one-day visit, and the remaining design work moves into CAD.
Before adopting portable scanning, Primary Designs relied on manual measurement and a Faro Arm, adequate for basic checks but not for the surface deviation analysis increasingly demanded by Formula One customers. Every race-ready component is now inspected against its CAD model using VXinspect software, generating deviation reports before parts reach the customer. The company also uses the scanner on reverse-engineering jobs, capturing the full vehicle rather than the existing exhaust, since original parts can distort over time and no longer reflect the vehicle's true geometry.
The switch also changed how Primary Designs handles outsourced scanning. Third-party providers could capture data but, lacking exhaust-design expertise, often returned incomplete datasets that caused delays. In-house scanning lets engineers capture extra geometry during each visit, even when its value isn't immediately obvious, on the chance it proves useful later in a project.
Primary Designs has also started digitizing its manufacturing jigs with the HandySCAN, linking scan data to customer records and serial numbers to build a traceable archive it can reference across future production runs.
