3D Scanning in Placerville, CA

Placerville was the gold camp called Hangtown, incorporated under its present name in 1854, and it has been the El Dorado County seat since the seat moved from Coloma in 1857. Main Street still carries much of that history, and several of its buildings are individually on the National Register: Confidence Hall at 487 Main (listed 1982), the Fountain-Tallman Soda Works at 524 Main (1984), the John Pearson Soda Works at 594 Main (1985), and the Main Street Post Office at 515 Main, added in January 2025. The City's General Plan designates historic downtown as a design review area. Since Ordinance 1640 in January 2011, staff apply the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation when they review building modifications in the city's four residential historic districts. Work under that kind of review has to start from an accurate picture of what exists, and old masonry on sloping ground is never as square as a tape survey suggests.

Some of Placerville's history is underground. The Hattie (Gold Bug), Priest, and Silver Pine mines on Bedford Avenue, with their stamp mill, were listed on the National Register in 1985 and are now part of the city's Gold Bug Park. Adits, tunnels, and mill structures are hard to draw by hand and easy to capture with a scanner, which measures every surface in reach without anyone touching the rock. Above ground, Marshall Medical Center is the area's hospital, and healthcare renovation is a strong case for scanning: occupied floors, packed ceiling spaces, and short access windows. Highway 50 and Highway 49 meet in town, and many lots along them are steep, with retaining walls and additions stacked on the slope. On new construction we verify anchor bolts and steel to 1/8 inch from the scan, with total station check shots near tolerance.

Control is GNSS primary and Trimble S3 total station secondary, held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control, with scans from a Trimble X9 processed in Trimble Business Center. You receive a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, and coded points, plus a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. Your architect can draw or model from the cloud directly. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning across the Gold Country, and our Placerville surveying page.