3D Scanning Case Study: VALTRA N-series N155 Forestry Guarding Kit

Project: Provide a 3D Scan of a VALTRA N155 to aid in the design and fitting of a bespoke forestry guarding kit. This machine arrived onsite with a pre-existing “belly plate”. This is a forestry guarding panel for the underside of the tractor, which is usually something the design team have to design and put into production as part of these kits.
This belly plate was scanned separately, to allow the design team to assemble it within the machine scan and take its geometry into account when designing in CAD.

In our scanning software, we can extract highly accurate measurements of the position, diameter and angles of our guard kit mounting points. This info is provided to the design team to help them design guarding that will be perfectly tailored to the machine.

Scanning the belly plate allows us to get a 3D representation of this part without spending the time hand measuring and fully modelling up in CAD.

From here a decision can be made to spend the time reverse engineering a model of this belly plate, or in this case, extracting reference geometry of the mounting bolts and assembling the scans together.

Having the scan of the belly plate allows for our guarding kit to be accurately design and match the angles and sizes of the preexisting belly plate. Scanning the belly plate separately was important as if the decision was made to cut our own, the belly plate could be toggled off and the data on the underside of the tractor can be revealed.