Sheffield based product designer Tom Fripp (principle of Fripp Design Limited) had a problem. His dad’s 60th birthday was rapidly approaching and he was struggling with what to buy for this special occasion; when he came up with an idea.

His dad owns a 1931 Morgan three wheeler Supersport and Tom thought it would be a great idea to build him a full colour 1:10 scaled model. The problem was; there wasn't any commercially available kits for him make it from. So he decided to build his own model, from scratch, using his Product Design and Rapid Prototyping skills at Fripp Design.

"I started with a blank piece of paper" said Tom, "Well, actually, it was a blank computer screen and pictures my mother sent me from home". Tom patiently spent his evenings and a weekend faithfully recreating the car's parts and dimensions using Solidworks. He then applied colour to the model using Magics from Materialise. "With the CAD file I could create some virtual images and animations of the Morgan, but what I really wanted was a model that dad could put on the mantelpiece" Tom continued.

Fortunately the answer was at hand! As part of Fripp Design's services, they build parts on their ZCorp 510 3D colour printer. The printer can take a 3D CAD file and build a 3 dimensional model from it. "When the model came out of the printer, even I was amazed how lifelike it was; dad's face was a picture when he got it" concluded Tom.

The Morgan car company is 100 years old this year and the model is going to be exhibited at a number of events to celebrate their centenary.