Aftermarket companies stay competitive when they are flexible in dealing with ever-changing product designs. Designers adding non-factory parts, accessories and upgrades to a motor vehicle, for example, often face issues with CAD drawings that are outdated or too detailed. Instead, tow bar manufacturers use a portable MMDx laser scanner on an MCAx articulated measuring arm to quickly digitize a vehicle’s rear bottom end. In their mechanical design software, they use the 3D scan surfaces to set the accurate spatial boundary conditions for designing a dedicated tow bar system. In the process, the point cloud software filters the point cloud, eliminates excess points and transforms the point cloud into a polygon surface mesh.

Also when stretching and armoring prestige vehicles for kings, presidents and sheiks, engineers scan the entire vehicle body after seats and trim have been removed. A K-Scan MMDx tracked by a K-Series Optical CMM is used to ergonomically capture vehicle interior and exterior in one go, avoiding many costly and time-consuming iterations later in the process. Aftermarkets rely on fast and accurate reverse engineering metrology solutions to quickly acquire critical engineering insight in the earliest stages of development.