Facing retirement, 3D scanning and printing is used to rescue a 103-year-old Delage Type-S Grand Prix car from the great junkyard in the sky.

At 103 years old, the last remaining Delage Type-S Grand Prix car is older than most people on the planet. And incredibly, it’s still cruising the roads in Australia thanks to 3D printing technology.

Things could have turned out differently, however, when the car’s engine block cracked in 2014. Such a problem is nearly impossible to repair because there are no replacement parts or original drawings for the mechanics to refer to. Plus, it’s hard to keep instruction manuals for longer than a couple of months, let alone a century.

Out of commission, the Delage was gathering dust in a mechanic’s workshop in Castlemaine, Australia. In the meantime, pre-war motorcar engineer Grant Cowie began exploring ways he could save and rebuild the 16-valve engine.

“I knew that to use the traditional method, which involves a wooden pattern, would be prohibitively expensive and with such a complicated casting it was possible it would take several attempts to get it correct,” said Cowie.

So, he decided to use a never-before attempted digital manufacturing method. This way, he could clone the original block without damaging any of the car parts.

Using 3D Printing to Save the Delage Type-S

Cowie used lasers to 3D scan both the inside and outside of the engine block, saving huge amounts of time and energy. The 3D scan data is then used to digitally recreate — and repair – the cracked engine.

After the initial work on a computer, a sand mold is made using a 3D printer. Using this mold, a local iron foundry are able to cast the new engine. The final stage is finishing using traditional manual machining.

Amazingly, everything came together smoothly. “It’s one thing to finish machining it, then you’ve got to put it all together,” Cowie says. “And just the relief when it first started — and it’s been great since the moment we started it.”

Project manager Philip Guilfoyle believes that a repair of this scale is unique. “To my understanding,” he says, “this hasn’t been done before in car restoration in the world.”

Stuart Murdoch is the owner of the Delage Type-S. He’s tremendously happy the car will live to see another century. “I had faith in them and I wasn’t disappointed,” he says. “It is a considerable achievement for all those involved and, might I say, quite an achievement for Australian engineering.”

Using the same revolutionary digital repair technique, more owners could adopt 3D scanning and printing to save their historic cars from the rocky road of extinction.

Source: ABC News