Unique bathtub

Unique bathtub thanks to reverse engineering using the Calibry scanner

Have you ever thought about how bathtubs are made? We recently found out. The Triton company, the manufacturer of hot tubs, produced almost two hundred models of bathtubs, each of them had its own unique shape and size. Moreover, each model had its own "matrix", which in bathtub jargon means "master shape". This main shape was used as the base around which acrylic sheets were laid out and then cooled to create a perfectly smooth and beautiful bathtub.

The problem is that matrices made of aluminum or composite materials are only expected to last about 3 years (to create up to 8,000 identical bathtubs). They erode, crack and wear over time, causing imperfections to appear in the final product. When this happened, and it was necessary to create another master model, it turned out to be extremely problematic as it is almost impossible to manually copy complex design curves and the company did not have CAD drawings. Triton technicians decided to use the innovative technology of digitizing objects using the Calibry scanner to reverse engineer all their matrices to obtain templates for the hot tubs for the future. What once took Triton engineers an average of 7 days, now takes 3 hours (from scan to CAD drawing).

The bathtub is covered with markers and ready for scanning

A 3D scanner was used to digitize these matrices along with large markers, with a radius of 11 mm, printed on self-adhesive paper. The first working scan of the entire facility was obtained in just 2 minutes. It is worth adding here that closing the large entrance door to the studio, through which a lot of sunlight entered, improved the quality of the obtained scan.