1970s motorcycle CAD recreation
Reverse-engineered CAD models of components for a 1970s motorcycle that no longer exists, rebuilt for a one-of-a-kind "as-original" restoration — recreated entirely from photographs, memory, and a handful of hand sketches, with no original drawings or surviving parts to work from.
There were no original drawings for these components, and no surviving parts to measure from directly — just a handful of photographs and, in places, hand-drawn sketches trying to describe geometry that was clearly more complex than a rough sketch could really capture. Recreating them properly in CAD meant working out surfaces, wall sections, and draft from reference alone, and making judgement calls on details a sketch simply couldn't resolve.
A handful of components were machined from the finished models to check the reverse-engineering against reality before committing further — each was 3D-printed first to confirm basic fit and function, machining only where it was worth the cost of finding out. The parts are destined for actual use in a small run of exclusive, as-original replica builds, not just as a design check, which raised the bar for how close the models needed to be to the genuine article.