With more than 3.47 million subscribers on YouTube, Adam LZ has been letting his followers join him in the passenger seat of his drift cars for some incredible drives. He has a passion for building and driving cars, plus tuning them to high performance capabilities and making unique aesthetic modifications. With this passion comes the desire to create new, bespoke customizations — and as such, he is constantly searching for new and better ways of reverse engineering.
Before his large social media audience was joining him, though, his friend and fellow drift car enthusiast Matt Mogensen was there, helping with custom builds in his spare time and sharing ideas. Matt and Adam met in college, where the two bonded over their mutual interest in high-performance automobiles. Matt graduated from the University of Central Florida with a mechanical engineering degree in 2016, and shortly thereafter began work at FARO®, where he has been for the past seven years.
In the time since graduation, Adam’s gone from working on one car per year to custom builds every few months with the help of a larger team. And thanks to Matt’s work at FARO, they both have grown increasingly curious about the potential of using 3D laser scanning technology to improve the quality of drift car builds.
Recently, Adam and Matt got the chance to do their first reverse engineering project with FARO 3D hardware and software. The project was to work on the customization of an extremely rare part called the ganador mirror. This particular car mirror was made in limited numbers in the 1990s for a specific chassis and has since been discontinued, making the stylish mirrors rare, expensive and highly sought after among the community. It’s always been a dream of Adam’s to see if he could find a way to disassemble the ganador mirrors and rebuild their base so that they could be put onto different car models.
Before he discovered the capabilities of the FARO Quantum Max ScanArm and FARO RevEng™ Software, Adam was considering doing this project with fiberglass and manual measurement methods. However he and Matt were able to use the ScanArm to scan an original ganador mirror, plus the drift car, and then use 3D modeling software to compare the two and create a part that could be cast and custom installed.
Watch this video case study to find out just how they did it — and how FARO tools cut a drastic amount of time from the automotive reverse engineering process, allowing enthusiasts to create bespoke customizations for their high-performance drift cars.
Get in touch with a FARO representative to learn more here: www.faro.com