The Original Luna Park Will Be Rebuilt! (In Miniature Scale, With Printed Plastic)

Fred Kahl is known in Coney Island as The Great Fredini with his Scan-A-Rama, where he scans and creates prints of people as souvenirs. Now, he has also embarked on a project to create a 3D printout of Coney Island’s destroyed Luna Park, according to the Atlantic.

The Atlantic describes the process:

First he has to make sure the five 3D printers working out of his home studio are churning out the goods. “At any given time I have at least three machines printing,” he says. “I try to start prints every morning and every evening. It’s still a lot of work maintaining them, though; bearings need replacing, boards fry, extruders clog. I can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve put into this. It’s totally obsessive.”

Kahl makes models based on reference from a collection of historic Luna Park imagery that he has gathered. “In the old days I would find postcards at flea markets,” he says. “The advent of Ebay made collecting postcards easier. I have hundreds of cards and photos now, as well as images I’ve scrounged online from the Library of Congress, Pinterest, blogs, you name it.”

… “I basically build the park’s structures in software using photo references, and place a 3D scan of a human in the model for scale to get the proportions right,” he says. “When I’m done, I export parts, scale them and cut them into printable sized chunks that will later be glued and assembled. Its hard to reconstruct because the park changed every season, so I’m just shooting for an amalgam of what it was at its peak around 1914.”

The artist will be basing most of his prints on old postcards and depictions of the the park. He’s collected them on his Flickr. He’s also working miniatures of his Kickstarter donors into the panorama, and a portion of it will be on display at the Coney Island museum beginning in May.