3D Scanning Used in Antique Furniture Restoration

An Antique Furniture Restoration Company in Austin, Texas had an interesting problem to solve. They needed to restore a piece of furniture that had a right and left hand detailed carving. The left hand piece was missing and needed to be replaced. The detail was too involved to do by hand so the company turned to Absolute Geometries for help.

Original right hand carving

Absolute Geometries used 3D scanning to create a digital copy of the furniture piece. Because of the many undercuts and detail angles, they decided to use an arm based scanner vs a stationary system. A stationary scanner would have required too many setups and scan merges to be practical. A Faro Laser Scanarm V3 was used to complete the job. The V3 scanner has improved performance on shiny and dark surfaces which was very important for this project. No coating could be applied to the rare piece of furniture, not even powder. The V3 had no problem scanning the piece without modification.

Scan data

The scan data was converted to an STL file that was used to machine the replacement wood piece. The replacement is an exact replica of the original.