A junkyard is what awaited one mining machine whose glorious times had been forgotten to the junkyard of history... until one day a knight in shining armor appeared on the doorstep of a mine in southern Luxembourg. Following many years of service, the machine in question, let’s call her Fernande, since her looks echo Picasso’s paintings inspired by one of his muses, Fernande Olivier, was on the precipice of the second chapter of her mechanical life.
It was decided to turn the mine, long since barren of ore, into a museum, and Fernande was given a place in an open-air enclosure adjacent to the entrance leading to the main shaft.
Years went by... Fernande lost count of the garrulous kids touring the museum on schooldays, not to mention all the chirping crakes and partridges that perched upon her iron curves on sunny afternoons.
Then, one such afternoon, a visitor showed up at the museum to turn the iron Fernande into a model, using one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century: a 3D scanner named Artec Leo, just as smoothly as her prototype had been turned into a model by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century 100 years before that.
Working in hyperrealism, the laser-eyed Leo took a brief 10 minutes to capture Fernande’s valves, gears, and bolts with submillimeter accuracy. Even the fallen leaves and moss covering the pedestal Fernande was seated on were reconstructed in 3D. Within less than 20 minutes, the scans were cleared of noise, precisely aligned with each other, and fused into a high-resolution 3D model, thus preserving Fernande’s image for all eternity.
Unlike Picasso’s model, the iron Fernande can be viewed in person at the National Mining Museum of Luxembourg, and if so desired, you are welcome to compare her to her 3D double.