My client Hyforce Engineering won a contract to provide the steelwork for a walkway to cover a new pathway from the domestic car park to the new Hotel next door. The catch was that the path and HD bolts had already been installed and nobody could provide position information for the installed bolts and adjacent structures.

This was an interesting one as I had never used laser scanning to pinpoint HD bolts before. In fact I wasn't sure a scan would be accurate enough to achieve this. However my doubts were unfounded and so long as the scans were focussed on the hd bolt areas the data came though really well.

This does mean you have to do additional scanning to ensure that you capture enough detailed information but its worth it. It turned out that every single base plate had to be slightly differently aligned to accommodate the HD bolts. This is easy to do in Tekla but not so easy on site.