On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:49:56 -0600, "Morris Dovey" wrote:

If I wanted to duplicate the shape of my phone, I'd probably blow away
$35 in 23K gold leaf to make its surface conductive and pull it up to
5V through a resistor and use that as an input to my PC parallel port.
I'd ground a chucked probe needle, and I'd write a program to map
however many surface points I felt I needed. If I were sufficiently
anal about accuracy, it might take more than the four years you have
available to accumulate enough data to adequately approximate the
shape. (I'm not that anal - I'd probably just buy another phone)

Such things are usually designed.
This often involves creating lines, arcs, perhaps other fairly simple
curves and then generating surfaces from them. Sometimes people
even make 2D dimensioned prints (paper) .. which adds even more
constraints as only certain simple things can be well dimensioned -
hence that's all they could have made.
Those surfaces may then have other related surfaces, such as
3D fillets, applied to them.
Think like the designer: find & measure those original curves
and then reverse engineer it to a surface or solid model with a
CAD/CAM system.
Pretty simple from there .... usually g.

Xposted to rec.crafts.metalworking & comp.cad.solidworks ....
--
Cliff