Digitally Repairing and Restoring Classic Boats with EinScan Libre

Restoring and preserving classic boats is a meticulous process that requires meticulous skill, deep expertise, and absolute precision. At ALVEUS Bootsbau, maintaining the integrity of every vessel is a top priority. With SHINING 3D’s high-accuracy 3D scanning solutions, ALVEUS Bootsbau has fundamentally changed how they approach restoration. They are now achieving higher accuracy and speed across boat decks, hulls, and every structure onboard.

Challenges in Traditional Boat Deck Restoration

Repairing a boat is far more challenging than just fixing a component. Boats are filled with complex shapes: sharp curves, tricky concave surfaces, undercuts, and mixed materials that make taking manual measurements a nightmare. For years, craftspeople had to rely on hand-made templates and endless trial-and-error adjustments. This old-school approach came with serious drawbacks:

• Time-consuming: Creating templates for irregular surfaces often took days of careful work.
• Error-prone: small inaccuracies in measurement can compromise symmetry, fit, and safety.
• Limited for complex structures: curved hulls, internal bulkheads, and decorative details are difficult to replicate without modern tools.

Fritz Müller, founder and owner of ALVEUS Bootsbau, explains the frustration:

“Some shapes cannot be mapped at all, and unrolling them is difficult. Essentially, a large template material must first be placed over the component, the shape traced, worked out, and transferred to the new component. This often leads to transfer errors; materials must be sourced, and damage or warping can occur.”