I have been thinking about this idea to fix ski and snowboard ptex with 3D printing.
Last year I made a little manual repair tool out of a hot end with a base and spring setup where I could push the hot end down into scratches, then feed PE repair filament by hand as I moved the repair tool by hand.
This was a pretty cool proof of concept and I think my results were probably at least as good as traditional methods but still not perfect.
I could make a simple working prototype for flatter areas by making something pretty close to a traditional 3D printer that mounts to the surface and prints a small flat area but this doesn't address the curved areas so I would love to make a working prototype that at least started to show something could work on non flat geometry.
One idea was wheels that roll along the surface and a pressure wheel that rolls along the back (or really top) side. Even this has challenges with the width changing and some skis and snowboards having non flat top sides. Along with wanting to be able to print right up to the edge of the board.
The other big challenge if this is recognizing the gouges, assigning them a coordinate system, and then slicing and printing.
I could do this by doing something like mounting a printer, 3D scanning the surface with some reference points on the printer I can use to assign coordinates, then do some mesh work to fill the void and create a solid object to put into a slicer. This again works easier for flat areas.
More ideal would be to be able to scan the surface from the 3D print head. If you had an axis that rolled along the curved surface and say a laser scanner or something that scanned perpendicular to that axis it could then basically interpolate the scan as a flat surface.
I have been wondering if there is anything that could be done easily that could take advantage of existing bed leveling firmware.
Would it be possible to do this with a capacitive sensor or is there anything similar that could easily work mostly off existing tech and firmware?
Then the next question would be whether you would need to send the scan to other software. I expect the answer is yes but I have been wondering how hard it would be to take that "bed mapping" determine a best fit surface, detect any imperfections say more than .1mm deep by a couple mm squared, create a watertight geometry of the scratch/gouge, generate a simple slicing profile for that geometry and fill it in.
I recognize this would be a good ways beyond your average bed leveling gcode but I am curious if it would be possible to achieve with a reasonable amount of work.
Otherwise we could do something like send scan to a mesh editor, create 3D geometry, send to slicer, generate Gcode, then back to the printer.
Another thought i had the other day was using a robot arm to do this. This eliminates the issue of trying to get a 3 axis machine to track a non flat surface. I imagine it would add a good bit of complexity in other ways though. A quick search makes it look like at least some development is going into getting Duet to run a robotic arm.
This could allow the arm to be mounted separately. If the arm scanned the surface the scan would be tied to it's coordinate system. Then it is just that matter of creating geometry for the voids, slicing, and sending back to the machine.
I know this would be a pretty big undertaking.
If a finished product could be delivered for the right price I think there could be some interest in the ski industry. If it was dialed in I suspect there are even some hobbyists would would be interested in building their own.