Pardon the brim remnants. Not pictured: the many prior iterations. This started as a head on photo that I imported into fusion 360 and scaled after some measuring with calipers. It’s not perfect, but it’s rapidly approaching good enough. The square indent is to help with orientation - although the part obviously is not symmetrical, it’s much harder to judge the home.
I appreciate you not being defensive and just explaining your process in so much detail. I learned something about how finnicky some of these parts can be. I wonder if another strategy would be to trace the part onto paper and scan it, to get an undistorted shape?
And I don’t mind explaining things, it’s someting I sort of can’t help to be honest. I hope it’s useful to someone.
Tracing can work, but it’s a little fickle too. In this case the part had a small radius on its face. There’s also the whole pencil lead has width thing, but it can work OK if you’re very intentional at keeping the pencil tip pointing at the part in question.
Flatbed scanners also work fairly well, but they’re focused at the glass height and you quickly lose detail if the parts have a radius on them.