Case study
The BMW bracket you cannot buy on its own
The rear parcel shelf of a BMW M440i xDrive pivots on two small plastic brackets. One pivot pin snapped off, and BMW sells the bracket only together with the entire shelf. The owner mailed us the broken part; here is how it became a printed replacement, step by step. Drag the model to compare the scan with the rebuilt part.
Start a similar projectThe challenge
A snapped pin, no spare part
The customer's request was simple: the mounting bracket that carries the pivot pin for the rear parcel shelf of a 2024 BMW M440i xDrive had snapped, and BMW does not sell the bracket separately, only the complete shelf. No CAD, no drawings, just the broken original sent to us by post. The part is small, but the shelf does not work without it, so the replacement had to match the original exactly.
The scan
Capturing the real geometry
We scanned the broken bracket on the Creaform HandySCAN, which captures the surface at 0.025 mm accuracy. The result is a dense triangulated mesh, the gray model in the viewer above, that records every face, radius, and clip exactly as the part exists, including the fracture where the pivot pin used to be. This raw scan is the ground truth everything else is measured against.
The rebuild
From mesh to clean CAD
A raw scan is accurate but not editable: it is millions of triangles, not features. We aligned the mesh, rebuilt the bracket as clean parametric CAD, and reconstructed the snapped pivot pin to its original dimensions, the red model in the viewer. The deviation view shows how faithfully the rebuild follows the scan: green areas sit within 0.8 mm, and magenta marks geometry the scan never captured, like the rebuilt pin.
The result
A printed replacement that fits
We printed the bracket on our Formlabs SLA platform in a durable resin and test fitted the original screws before shipping. The replacement dropped straight into the shelf, and the owner keeps the STL and CAD files, so the part can be reprinted or adjusted any time, with no dependence on buying the complete shelf.
From the workshop
Have a part like this?
Send us a photo and a few details. We will tell you whether scanning and reverse engineering is the right route, and what it would take.