This week I kicked off the process of making brand-new “eyebrows” for Spiffy, our 44ft hurricane-damaged Antares 44 catamaran. One eyebrow is missing completely and the other is pretty beat up, so we’re making these big parts from scratch. The goals were simple on paper: finalize the shape using my Einstar Vega 3D scanner, and figure out what mold material actually makes sense before I commit to full-size tooling. Scanning outdoors was the first hurdle—bright sun and white gelcoat is basically the worst-case scenario—so I waited for softer light and then the Vega performed flawlessly with tracking dots. I ended up with a massive point cloud (hundreds of thousands of points, and about 70GB across scans) and pulled the mesh into Fusion… which is where the hair-pulling started. To sanity-check accuracy and get hard measurements, I CNC-cut a giant “jigsaw puzzle” template, iterated it, and then took roughly 400 measurements back into CAD. Along the way I also tested mold materials: XPS foam (cheap but messy and needs protection from styrene), MDF (surprisingly great with Duratech primer and sands nicely, but heavy and hates moisture), ISO board (light and moisture-safe but trickier on verticals), and urethane tooling board (machines beautifully and seals easily… for 10x the money). No modeled eyebrow yet, but we’ve got good scan data, better measurements, and a clear direction for molds.