simonr

Someone (MUD possibly?) used to make seat risers which stepped backwards a bit which were good if you didn't have a bulkhead. For me, headroom is even more constrained than legroom, so raising the seat at all was not an option. It is still possible to move the seat back a bit more without a bulkhead. There's a folded lip on the seatbox where it joins to the rear tub. By cutting a couple of notches in this & fabricating the odd bracket, the bottom seat rails can be moved back however much you require without the risers. In the past, a few people made extended / king cabs (Mark90 IIRC amongst others). They feel like a good option for some more space behind the seats.

Have you checked that you actually have a spark on No3 plug by running with the plug removed?

I started with a cheapo plasma - and gave it to BusShed as I could never get it to work well (*see later!) Then I bought a cheap, used Hypertherm and it was amazing. Mark (BusShed) said it worked perfectly! However, his compressor had a huge reservoir. I later discovered that the evenness of the air supply is critical. If you have a piston compressor with a small reservoir, the air pressure pulses with the mains frequency. Since the torch voltage also pulses at 50Hz, you can see problems if the phase of the pulses in the air pressure are in or out of phase with the torch voltage. The phase is affected by things like the length of hose. When I bought the Hypertherm, I also bought a cheap used Hydrovane compressor - and I think that's why it worked so well by comparison. Sometimes people complain about the cost of Hypertherm consumables (roughly £10 per Nozzle or Electrode) where you can buy 100 Chinese ones for the same. However, there is a big difference! The airflow through the Hypertherm is much tighter & more cylindrical which concentrates the arc more and gives you a cleaner cut. The arc being more concentrated also increases the cutting depth for a given power. They also last a lot longer. RTech are not bad for the price but their HF Start is too (electrically) noisy for CNC. I used to have one of theirs too but it was only useful for hand cutting. The HF Start on the Hypertherm however doesn't cause any upset to the electronics. In your place, I'd buy a used Hypertherm Powermax 30 or 45 (the main difference is the duty cycle). I have a 30 now and it's fantastic for both hand and CNC. It's only 30A, but out performs the 50A RTech and the 60A Chinese one in terms of tidy cut depth. This is my current (3rd) itteration of my DIY CNC Plasma - you can just see the Hypertherm on the floor underneath. I get nice cut quality up to 10mm & OK up to 15mm. P.S. Don't believe the "50mm cut depth" type adverts - they are mostly very optimistic. For a clean cut, I would bet on about 3A per mm for Hypertherm, 6A for Chinese.

Having tried glue once upon a time - and regretted it, Fridge's suggestion is the best option!

Something worth mentioning here is your Volt Meter (Multimeter). The accuracy of a mid-range meter can easily be +/-1.5%. Cheap ones, even worse. Even a high-end meter will only be +/-0.3V DC Volts just after it's been calibrated. I would never rely on it to be better than +/-1%. A mid-range meter showing 14.5V could actually be anything from 14.3V to 14.7V. (On a high end meter, 14.35V to 14.65V) Thus I shouldn't worry too much about such small apparent voltage differences.

The distance is important - but most scanners will tell you when the distance is correct. A turntable with a fixed, adjustable scanner is useful for some scanners. Mine needs you to kind of 'paint' the surface - so having it fixed isn't helpful. I do have one of these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BJ3FQ9Z/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title A super-cheap turntable which has been useful for things that are just a bit too heavy to move around - things like a hub assembly. As Fridge suggested, I've used a wheely trolley for bigger things like a 60kW electric motor for a wind machine.

It wouldn't be hard to design a handle + phone holder with a couple of buttons linked to levers which press on the appropriate bit of the phone screen. You can get pen type stiluses which will trigger a touch on a phone screen - so if the lever had the rubber tip from one of these, they could simulate the touch. I downloaded this handle for the Einstar - which makes the thing much more comfortable & stable to use: I re-mixed it a bit, adding the boss on the right which takes a 1/4 Thread insert. I have one of these screws which pokes through te other hole to secure it to the scanner, which, when not in use screws into the thread for storage. EINSTAR HANDLE 2.STL

I don't know! I tend to use it for planar surface & feature extraction - for reverse engineering. For that, it's very useful. Speaking to one of my friends, he says he uses Blender when he's trying to work with 'sucked sweet' (as he put it) type shapes to extract surfaces & bring them in to SW. However, I've never used Blender so have no idea about the workflow

That's true - but it's still pretty clunky to use! I use an add-in called Xtract3D which is better, but still not perfect. Fusion has a much better toolset for dealing with meshes. I've been using Chalk Spray: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Montana-Chalk-Temporary-Marking-Eco-Friendly/dp/B00JEECAEW/ref=sr_1_5 It has the advantage of being available in multiple colours. The scan specific spray always seems to be white, which is great until you want to scan a shiny white thing!

The results look good. I would also be interested to see what kind of measurement accuracy it delivers. It's worth trying with an object you can scan all the way around to see if the scan at the end lines up with that at the start. That's a good test of the cumulative accuracy. Hairspray works quite well for matting down surfaces. You can get chalk spray which is better, but more expensive. Your scanner appears to cope with shiny surfaces a lot better than the einscan - but the more help you can give it, the better the results. I do use retroflective location markers too - but they are surprisingly expensive & you can eat a whole lot of them! I drew & printed a load of these https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5787919/files If you insert a magnet and cover the sides with marker dots, you can scatter them over something you're scanning - but re-use them again & again.

I'll be very interested to know how you get on. I almost ordered one last night - but realised I'd need to upgrade my phone to work with it. Apparently, mine (S10) is too slow / old! If I factor in the cost of the phone, it becomes less attractive.

I used it to scan a replica Roman boat (which was used in Indiana Jones) in order to make a cradle to support it on a motion platform. It's owners were a bit precious about it and we only had to boat for a couple of days filming. I went to their yard to scan it - then we had accurate measurements to build the rig & internal structure for lights, camera etc, knowing it would all fit when it arrived at the Studio. The compound curves of the hull - and that none of the internal beams were particularly straight would have made it near impossible to measure with a tape with the required accuracy! I do often have to survey structures (quite often boats) and for me, this has been a game changer!

The Creality CR Scan Ferret looks surprisingly good - and half the price of mine. Being able to use a phone as the capture device would be very useful for getting in & around vehicle bits. Mine has a long umbilical to my laptop but it needs mains to power the scanner with a chunky power brick at the laptop end. I'm quite tempted to buy one - my only hesitation is the lack of storage in a typical phone. One of my raw scans was over 600GB. Maybe it does something clever to compress the data? A while later... Having watched a few videos about it, the CR-Scan is limited ot 2000 frames per scan, or about 60 seconds of scanning. While this doesn't give enough time to walk around a whole vehicle, you could split it up into multiple scans & stitch them together. The Einstar is only limited by how much storage space you have. My 600GB scan took several hours. This is one component from that scan - an engine from a Willy's Jeep.

That would help - and the software generally has tools to automatically splice scans together. While this is normally used so you can scan both sides of an object, it equally works for side by side, so long as both scans contain a couple of reference points for alignment. One of the mistakes I made at first was confusing resolution for accuracy. If you set very high resolution, say 0.1mm - it just records lots of points, filling up memory very quick. If you set a lower resolution, say 2mm, the precision of the location of the points is just as good, just fewer of them. Now I tend to do a low res scan of the whole of the object and multiple high-res ones for things like mounting centres - then stitch them together at the end.

I have an Einstar Scanner - and it's pretty good for the money. If anything, the software for the scanner is more important than the scanner itself. The Einstar uses the same software as their more expensive Einscan scanners - and as such is also prety good. Bear in mind (also) that you need a PC with a decent amount of memory for it to be useful. I use my laptop with 64GB and it has coped with everything so far. It takes a bit of figuring out - but you can get good results. One of the issues that most of the cheap scanners have is the inaccuracy is cumulative. I tried scanning a Chassis about 10 years ago - and although the scan looked OK, when I tried to turn it into a CAD model, it was obvious that it was twisted & deformed by about 15mm at the opposite corner to where I'd started. The Einstar seems to manage about +/-0.5mm on any two points per metre apart. It's still not perfect but +/-3mm on a chassis is a lot better than +/-15mm.