Located in Southern California, West Coast Customs has become famous for their one-of-a-kind, multi-million-dollar custom car builds featured on their TV show or in the news. The team’s ultimate goal with every project is to build custom works of art to fulfill their clients’ automotive dreams.
That team consists of designers, technicians, fabricators, and painters working together in their 60,000 square foot shop and headquarters in Burbank. Synchronizing the efforts of two dozen specialists working on 30+ projects at any given time is a balancing act that would make an air traffic controller proud.
West Coast Customs achieved its fame early on by taking auto customization up to the next level. Whether that’s boosting a car’s horsepower, beefing up the suspension, giving it a dazzling paint job, thundering exhaust pipes, extra-wide wheels, Indy-500-level steering, or whatever body mods you can dream up, West Coast’s designers are ready to sit down with you, sketch it out, and literally set the wheels in motion.
A few of West Coast Customs’ recent, more high-profile projects include the Star Trek Slingshot Vehicle, the Black Panther Lexus, and the West Coast Racers roller coaster/Six Flags.
A critical phase of the customization process is measuring a car and designing mods that blend perfectly with the car’s existing fascia, structure, components, and chassis. How West Coast Customs did this in the past was entirely by hand, and that meant rulers, calipers, tape measures, pencils and pens, etc.
Some parts are trickier than others. For example, doors, hoods, and bumpers are relatively easy to measure, but when it comes to fenders, grills, headlights, mirrors, and smaller, more complex objects with thin edges and curves, such as interiors and steering wheels, that’s where hand measurement really struggles.
It was painfully slow, with redos needed more often than not. As their plate of projects grew fuller, with deadlines becoming tighter, the old way was no longer acceptable. And that’s when they began to explore the possibilities of 3D scanning.
During a demo by the 3D scanning specialists from Artec Certified Reseller Rapid Scan 3D, the management at West Coast Customs saw that this was the edge they were looking for. They decided upon the Artec Eva, a professional structured-light 3D scanner that’s world-famous for its ability to quickly scan anything from auto parts to human bodies and deliver stunning, high-precision color 3D models in mere minutes.
“Once we saw what Eva could do for us in terms of its accuracy and speeding up the workflow, we were totally sold. Eva is a huge time saver for us, and we’re talking about saving us weeks in production man-hours every month,” said Lorenzo Strong, West Coast Customs’ VP of Sales. “All those hard-to-measure parts that took us hours to measure in the past? In just a few minutes, Eva scans everything in full color, way more precisely than by hand, and with no miscalculations.”
Click here to read more about how Artec 3D helped West Coast Customs make their clients’ dreams a reality. Click here to see it with your own eyes.
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