ABSTRACT
In recent decades, one of the most serious challenges in the preservation of cultural and historical heritage (CH) has been the rapid decay of exterior monuments due to environmental deterioration, especially in large industrial megapolises. The question on the need to re-construct damaged CH objects or to gradually replace them with copies. According to the world practice, it is the only opportunity to preserve the most important monuments of the past for descendants, at least their most valuable ones. Innovative 3D laser scanning technology combined with milling machines with numerical software control is established approach of replicating CH objects. The paper discusses the state-of-art of various 3D-printing techniques in terms of the feasibility of their use in restoration, as well as for creating replicas. In addition, we describe the case study of replication and reconstruction of the 19th century cast-iron artifact realized using combination of 3D laser scanning and 3D-printing
