Festival and Race for Italian Supercars, Motorbikes, and Cyclists. Italy, Emilia-Romagna Piacenza, Castell'Arquato 16-18 September 2016.
We were contact recently by the organisers of the Best of Italy Festival to get involved with a very special car project. They had purchased a mint Maserati 420 convertible from a dealership and had cut the windscreen off. Their aim was to produce a replica of the Candini monoposto Maserati 320.
They came to us because they knew we had the experience and technologies in house to to achieve the right result, first time and in the extremely tight time frame they had. So we were tasked with creating the canopy top that covers in the cockpit and passenger area.
3D Scanning
Due to the high degree of interface these new components were to have with the original bodywork of the Maserati, we needed to know accurately the shape of the car in the areas our components were going to fit. So we made use of blue light non contact 3D scanning. This is a very high accuracy aerospace scanning system than can capture the shape within a few thousandths of a millimetre. The picture below shows the prepared car surface and the scanner head in action.
The scan data is presented as a cloud of points and specialist software is used to interpret the data and convert the cloud into CAD compatible surfaces. In this case we required the surface data from around the cockpit opening and top part of the cars bodywork. We captured the entire bonnet because there is a future project for the car that may require this data.
3D Printing
During the course of the main project a couple of smaller projects were given to us to make use of our 3D printing capabilities. We have some of the best 3D printing technology in the area and combined with our 3D scanner we were able to create modified centre console parts and design a bespoke rear view mirror, within a few days.
The picture below shows super model Jodie Kidd in the bespoke designed and 3D printed rear view mirror, Jodie will be driving the car at the Best of Italy festival in September.
CAD Design
Designing a structure such as this with these highly complex surfaces, need to interface with the OEM body and the short lead times is extremely challenging. Modern CAD systems like ours have advanced tools for creating the shapes required, but, the nature of the shapes requires CAD operators with experience usually only found in the aerospace and motor sport industries. Luckily we have this level of experience in house and provides the link between all our manufacturing capability.
CNC pattern machining
Once the canopies design was complete and signed off by the customer we were able to use the CAD model and our CAM system to machine the pattern from which the moulds would be taken, on our CNC machining centre. The CAM system takes the complex surface geometry from the CAD model and directly generates machine tool paths from it. The result is the complex surfaces are create quickly and with an accuracy of tens of microns.
Mould Production
The final items for the project were made in fibreglass but there's a chance that future versions might need to be made in carbon fibre, which requires a high temperature cure cycle in our special oven system. In order to facilitate this possible requirement the moulds were made using a vinyl ester high temp capability resin system.
Carbon Fibre
No high tech project car would be complete with out at least a hint of carbon fibre. In this case we made the aeroscreen from the black composite material, that's famed for it's high stiffness modulus and high strength to weight ratio.
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