3D Scanning in Lincoln, CA

Lincoln is a clay town. Gladding, McBean was founded there in 1875 on a deposit of fine white kaolin clay beside the railroad, and the Lincoln plant still operates today as a division of Pacific Coast Building Products, which bought the factory in 1976. Over the decades it made sewer pipe, roof tile, and architectural terra cotta. Most of the buildings at Stanford University carry its roof tile and terra cotta details, and its job files from 1888 to 1966, held by the California State Library, cover thousands of buildings. That legacy matters for scanning in two ways. Industrial buildings and plant structures that have been in use for generations rarely have drawings that match them. And ornamented facades, wherever they stand, can be recorded in full by a scan, so profiles and joint lines are documented before repair or replacement work begins.

The rest of Lincoln is mostly new. The city incorporated in 1890, grew 282 percent between 2000 and 2010, the fastest growth of any U.S. city over 10,000 people in that decade, and counted 49,757 residents in 2020. The Highway 65 Lincoln Bypass, 12.48 miles long, opened in October 2012. West of downtown, the city-owned Lincoln Regional Airport began in 1942 as an Army Air Corps auxiliary field for B-25 training. It now covers 775 acres with a 6,001-foot runway, and the City describes it as positioned for aviation, light industrial, and commercial growth. Hangars and industrial buildings are where construction verification pays off: anchor bolts and steel checked to 1/8 inch from the scan, with total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance, plus slab deviation and levelness maps before equipment goes in.

Lincoln is on the far side of the region from our office in Lotus, so we plan Lincoln field days to finish control, scanning, and check shots in one trip, often alongside other South Placer work. Control is GNSS primary and Trimble S3 secondary, held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control; scans come from a Trimble X9 and are processed in Trimble Business Center. You get a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, and a report stating the control basis and accuracy achieved. See 3D laser scanning, scanning in Rocklin, scanning in Roseville, and our Lincoln surveying page.