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Serious quality issue at SHAPEWAYS, FED & FUD plastics


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I've been at Shapeways for about 2 years, so I had the opportunity to experience a lot of things. They went from being at the top of my list to bottom of the heap in terms of what I've experienced since I started using their services. The list of problems is long: poor and inefficient customer service, serious quality issue for FED & FUD plastics, questionable practices concerning the sales earnings of store owners (they systematically freeze earnings that are below 30$ for days, weeks or months rather than wire them to us), they very frequently cancel sales: up to 50% of my sales have been cancelled for nonsensical reasons such as a copyright mark on the back of my model that their software assumed would not print sharply as it is small, or sprues that the software think are too small but which printed perfectly before. They block some more affordable materials & instead offer the more expensive version (polished brass instead of unpolished), so much so that I asked them if they rigged their software to default to polished brass instead of unpolished, but they never offered a satisfactory answer or kept dodging).

 

So here's my review. It may save you lots of money, aggravation & endless weeks/months of useless efforts.

 

Now the 1st problem at Shapeways affecting scale modelers:

 

You may not have heard about it yet but their FED & FUD (multi jetted UV-curable acrylates used on their 3DSystems 3500HD Max printers) currently have a serious quality issue. Under circumstances that are still unexplained a percentage of the parts made from FED & FUD produce crystals blooms which slowly destroy their surface & details & render these often expensive parts useless. It can also occur after the parts paint were painted.

 

Crystallization starts to appear as early as 48 hour after clients open the package. In other cases clients report having stored their parts only to discover 2-3 years later that their parts have been eaten by crystals.

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/powder-appearing-on-fud-after-storage.68722/page-5

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/powder-appearing-on-fud-after-storage.68722/page-6

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/powder-appearing-on-fud-after-storage.68722/page-9

 

The cause of crystallization is officially unknown, but it's been 1 year + that SW finally acknowledged there's a problem & there's still no solution in sight. In fact the problem is actually over 6 years old: the 1st reports date back 6 years + on another section of their forum. Starting December 2016 there was a wave of new reports showing crystallized parts from store owners & clients. The reports included a mounting collection of ugly photos detailing the problem & kept piling up without response from SW, until a few months later they finally acknowledged it. Since then their follow up have been very infrequent. Basically they've offered no real solution, they haven't offered to reimburse their clients either.

 

It must be noted that since 1 year + that SW acknowledged the problem they never interrupted the production of FED & FUD, not even temporarily, while the crisis is still unresolved. I'm also not aware of any recall.

 

Some store owners say only 1% of their clients report being affected while others report up to 50% of their parts affected. Users on many train & warship forums report being affected in several countries.

 

There's been no official announcement on SW News pages about this problem, so the public is still largely unaware that their expensive parts may turn into a deformed mass of crystals. The only place where one can find most of the info is on their forum, if you're lucky to stumble upon the thread buried on a material finishing techniques section. (A few months ago SW added a small note on its material page saying this plastic have a poor UV resistance. But there is still no mention that a % of FED/FUD parts may crystallize).

 

I pushed SW during nearly 1 year to fix the crystallization issue.

 

If you're among the unlucky ones who received a part affected by crystallization that appeared months or years later I think it's unlikely you'll get a reimbursement. I've found a lot of complaints from SW clients on websites like Revdex.com about a variety of bad customer service issues. If you do a web search you will find a lot on consumer rights websites.

 

https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/shapeways.com

 

They also have questionable & contradictory policies : they say that your 3D printed models should only be used for decorative purpose. Yet on another of their publications they interview a drone manufacturer who chose SW to mass produce their components. Now i ask hypothetically: what happens if a drone manufactured at that 3D printing service falls on someone or on a car on the road and cause an accident with injury or worse ? It's a very conflicting message they are sending, contradicting their own rules.

 

Another problem i experienced : after many attempts and being bounced through many different customer agents it became clear that their 'print engineers' are generalists and none of them seem to be modelers nor understand what is a relevant model feature & what's not (to justify cancelling sales). Meaning they cancel a lot of sales for nothing (or if any of them are modelers it really doesn't show in the whole policies/client experience). And even after you complain it's too late, the sale is lost as store owners have no way to know who the clients are to warn them the problem have been resolved. This affects customer confidence, damages stores reputation and makes both store owners & SW lose sales, but apparently they couldn't care less as they refused the solutions I offered such as to let me phone their print engineers to warn them when i upload a new models that i know their software will block as it cannot discriminate between a relevant design feature and one that 's unimportant. They also ignored countless other stores complaints about cancelled sales.

 

SW doesn't even have a phone number on their website. I saw a fellow designer asking SW to provide us with a phone & being given the run around. I did a bit of research & found a number on a business directory & posted it to help him & other store owners. Guess what ? They deleted it. 

 

I then found 2 more phone numbers which I also posted. They also deleted them. Fantastic...

 

Meanwhile I found out iMaterialise have a phone # listed for ALL their offices in each country where they are located.

 

However SW have invested in a software that actually works: it deletes the name of competitors from posts... You can test it. I did. Store owners now use that feature in a more creative fashion : to get SW's quick attention about issues they bring up in posts when they are being ignored.

 

They say they can't have store owners call their printing dept as they are too busy. Same story for their customer service team which they keep saying is small. Don't get me started on their buggy softwares, faulty links that send you anywhere except to your products or entire models categories that can't be found on smart devices (by default we could only see 'most popular', with no way to search other categories. I found out after a lot of trials that only if you put your device horizontally then you can search other categories. Not the most congenial way to design a Web page... They finally fixed it this year. And the whole keychain category is not listed, so most of my metal designs remain invisible.

 

SW recently received 30 Millions $ in financing, & they have received over 100 Millions $ financing since they were created, yet they are not willing to hire more customer agents (a quick look at their forum shows tons of complaints & calls for help from clients, stores after the price hikes for nylon, FED, FUD, brass, plus their very complicated new method for calculating prices for FED & FUD which makes it impossible to know how much your design will cost until you've completely finished it, by that time you find it's too expensive to be commercially viable & you wasted your time.

 

They also announced the FED & FUD price hike as a price reduction. Problem is everyone with models bigger than a few cm saw their prices go through the roof. They also implemented a nonsensical policy to try to make modelers print their models finely detailled side oriented face down, with the wax support material smack unto the details, making the side that should be smooth now all frosted. They said that's because 3DSystems support material cost them too much & it cost them less wax if we print our models face down. Again, seems they couldn't care less about scale modelers needs nor the reason why we choose FED & FUD.

 

Plenty of other things related to their new pricing policy mean designers had to spend countless hours to try all kinds of ways to redesign their models in an attempt to offset the price hike. As if we had all the time & money in the world to jump through SW's new hoops.

 

In my opinion SW & 3DS will probably not fix the crystallization problem, with all the money they have & after more than a 1 year they should already have fixed it by now.

 

I made a big mistake a few years ago to believe the hype of SW & to push their name as the place to go for the best quality. I assumed they would be pros & responsible. It's only after I started using their service & uploading more models that I learned the hard way how much I had misjudged them.

 

But don't worry, I have other plans so I won't get stuck due to the crystallization problem. 

 

However, I have information from an industrial source that SW is probably not the only one affected by the problem of their 3DSystems UV-curable MJM acrylates, it looks like it also likely affect other 3D printing bureaus who are using the same materials & machines. The people i spoke to at another service say that raw material batches are sometime unstable and there are bad batches.

 

Edited by Stratospheremodels
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Take note that Shapeways Frosted Ultra Detail plastic (FUD) & Frosted Extreme Detail plastic (FED) have been renamed since the 17th of May as : Fine Detail Plastic. Maybe an attempt to make the info about the FED & FUD crystallization crisis go into a dead end on search engines, as some people on their forum already suspect (kind of like when Lululemon changed its name to Lole).

 
Also take note that I wrote most of the info in my previous post a few months ago (sorry, been delayed by too many things to post it earlier) and that since I wrote that they recently made yet another MASSIVE change about prices for several materials and website redesign that have enraged seemingly a lot of their store owners that are active on the forums, especially store owners who are scale modelers (but not limited to them only, other types of store owners are upset as well), and many of whom said they will close shop (because the new policies & algorithm are pricing them out of the market) or are buying their own printers. Amazingly SW & its new CEO seem to now be deliverately pushing away it's scale model shops, something many store owners have said, and SW's silence in response to their questions and calls for help is kind of saying it all.
 
More on this soon.
Edited by Stratospheremodels
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It's you again. With nothing to show for. Only a lot of big talk, with products that maybe 17 people are interested world wide. And then you talk about bulldozing over others... Shapeways seem to be doing the bulldozing if you ask me.

 

What happened to all the treads you started? Let me guess; you are still working on them and soon all the naysayers will crumble to pieces in your wrath, right? What a joke.

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 Sorry for the long post. It's not really my story, back in 2016 people at a scale model ships forum complained about their FED/FUD parts (made with multi jet printers from 3DSystems like the 3500HD Max at SW) as they were experiencing blooms of crystals that progressively cover the surface and details of those parts. Someone brought the problem to the attention of SW on their forum and ever since pretty much nothing was done to fix this as neither SW nor 3DS have fixed the material. The parts won't actually turn to dust but crystals do grow on a percentage of them and will grow even through paint in some cases. The % of parts affected is not clear, I have seen claims ranging from 1% to 50% depending on who you ask, but I did talk to a local RP service who was using the same machine when I was trying to find out if other companies beside SW were having the same problem and they told me several things things, they said they would sometime receive unstable batches or batches that already started to harden in the packaging. So it seems to be a QC issue with 3DSystems and the company that makes the material for them. They told me 3DS bought the MJM printers technology from another company but they didn't buy the chemistry that goes with it in the deal. So 3DS is dependant on an external plastics supplier. No idea what's their name as 3DS does not put that information on their materials packaging, and they aren't telling their clients either.

 

Yes, the prices of that material at SW have seen 2 big price hikes since about 1 year.

 

Personally I was not affected by the crystallization problem directly (though no idea if it will affect some of my clients who bought my models through SW, as some modelers store their parts for years only to discover later than they're affected too), so if someone sue SW about this it won't be me, but it definitely affected my strategy and my program as all my aftermarket parts had been designed specifically for SW's FED/FUD plastics minimum thickness & surface details, so when the crystallization issue blew in the open that certainly caused me a problem, as the last thing I want is to send my clients to buy parts that could become unusable. So I held back my main items until SW/3DS would fix this first and I only uploaded limited number of low demand niche items. Unfortunately more than a year later they have done nothing.

 

About "rambling" and power point, you better read SW's forums, you'll see a lot more issues in a lot more details from lots of store owners. What i posted here is very succint vs what's on their forum. It's not just the FED/FUD material issue that upset people, there are lots of bigger ones about SW that upsets them.

 

As for attacking someone when they bring you information that could save you from wasting your money on potential bad quality parts, I wonder about the logic of it, but then I you want to buy 100's of $ worth of crystallized parts I'm not holding you, it's your money, you're free to spend it as you wish. Someone else would say thank you for the heads up. 

 

I did my part for over 1 year to try to have them fix the issue, I pushed them hard, they did nearly nothing and mostly ignored us. I am done fighting it, I'm already working on plan B and C which doesn't involve that material.

 

As for "bulldozing", one can check SW's scale models stores, many are already doing that (bulldozing hand cast resin parts). I have seen stores with hundreds of scale models there. Some have over a 1000. So you could go complain about them if you still have issues with directly 3D printed model parts. But it's a bit late to do that because it is already fait accomplis since a couple years, by lots of companies. As for me I have been working at alternatives to FED/FUD plastics.

Edited by Stratospheremodels
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  • 2 weeks later...

I shouldn't have bothered spending so much time trying to push Shapeways to listen and fix their FED/FUD crystallization problem & so on. When i went back to have a look after a few months I found what I already knew was likely to happen : the new CEO announced another big price increase with new complicated algorithm & redesign of the website which generated widespread anger & ironic comments from scale modelers and shop owners. SW's boat is visible sinking :

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/pricing-changes.97888/

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/pricing-changes.97888/page-5

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/pricing-changes.97888/page-3

 

29 pages of 'fun'. There's even a meme about the Titanic on page 9.

 

And check page 10 for the mathematics demo about the new algorithm deciding the price hikes (your eyes will pop out).

 

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/pricing-changes.97888/page-10

 

SW visibly seems to want to get rid of stores that make 'tiny' parts because they are visibly pricing them out of the market. Plenty of long time scale model shops are closing or have bought their own printer. The new changes have put everything in disarray. Prices are going through the roof. They make store owners who still try to find solutions waste more time doing tests to try to find a work around the algorithm. And they have now hidden all the material prices, making designers waste precious design time just to find out how much their models will cost by uploading them so that SW can hide the bad news to the last moment til it's too late. A lot of people can no longer compete with SW'S prices and are moving out.

 

That Titanic is sinking.

 

What a pity given how much financing they've received, but since the whole drastic price hikes that became a yearly thing 3 years ago plus all the softwares issues, poor CS, the 'no reimbursement' policy after parts are sent to production & the rejection lottery, I saw this coming. Maybe they'll go bankrupt (they said they were losing money on post treatment, small parts, etc, yet are pushing away an entire category of store owners). People finally woke up after 1 year and one final big mess/price increase.

 

And they are inventing rules as they go & have a condition that basically says they can make any rule they want to get rid of a store as they can change the conditions at any moment... (not in those words but the end result is the same). What kind of 'contract' is it when they tell you that tomorrow they can make conditions that will turn to dust what they wrote earlier ? Nice "encouragement" to business & nice "stable" business environment... But with them wreaking entire product categories with crazed price hikes & new algorithms to hide how much models will cost for designers till the last moment, who cares about abusive contract terms... they torpedo their own clients by acting as if the only thing they care about is their investors, and 'the heck with store owners' who are forced to redesign lots of models at enormous cost & time to fit SW'S new hoops.

 

We have gov't organisation's in Canada who have gone to court against the biggest telecoms several times because of abusive contracts & practices & have won against them. Perhaps it's time to send the regulators against them so they'll stop their abusive practices. 

 

But you don't know the best one. According to a research done by an analyst in 2015, SW had an estimated 35000 stores. Recently SW officially claimed to have 45000. According to that analyst the majority of store owners earn on average less than 100$ in sales PER YEAR. Now making abstraction the awful managenent, CS, irresponsible price hikes forcing designers & store owners to devote countless hours to redesign their models to try to offset these, here's where it gets really disgusting :

 

You're happy, you've just made a sale ! (but hard reality : you're competing against 45000 stores, buried in a sea of millions of models, with poor navigation, mostly designed to put "most popular models" on the start page), but, oops... your earned mark-up is less than the $30 minimum SW require to wire your money... Now what happens if you have a new store and are competing against millions of products ? Those few first sales are important given how much time you spent to develop them (like my new line of sci-fi/science/aerospace related key chains and jewelry in my 2nd store which I'd put together to generate funds so I could continue to work on my main products for my 1st store (scale model aftermarket parts). The price hike for cast metals a year ago mostly priced them out of the market right after I had designed them specifically for SW's brass. So, if your combined earned mark-ups are below 30$, (you have to put low mark-ups for expensive materials like brass or FUD/FED, as material cost alone make up most of the price. If you add more to earn a decent revenue you've already priced them out). So if your earnings are less than 30$ for those first sales they FREEZE your earnings until new sales will add up to 30$ or more. 

 

Given that you are most likely like the majority of store owners : earning less than 100$ sales/year, seeing them freeze your earning is upsetting enough until you realize that on top of that :

 

*** What happens when your frozen earnings sit at SW'S bank for weeks/months ? (multiply by 45000 stores earnings of less than 30$ each). Yes, you got it : SW is making interests with our money. Easily hundreds of thousands, maybe up to a million $ per year ! And we NEVER see a cent of those interests, which to me is pure and simple theft. When I signed for stores at SW I never signed to allow SW to get rich making interests off frozen earnings belonging to me.

 

If the federal gov't have amounts that I can claim and I haven't claimed yet, when I finally get to claiming them after they've been sitting in their bank for a while, they send me my amounts, PLUS the interests that my amounts earned at the bank. That's the legal way. 

 

So I started to ask questions around and I think everyone with a store at SW should do the same and contact their politicians and representatives and ask them to pressure these people to pay us the interests they made off our backs. Because to me it looks like they are acting as if they were a bank (they are not a chartered bank. Even a bank can't keep my interests for itself) with our earnings which they freeze and then keep the interests as a profit even though we never chose to let them use our earnings to generate a parallel business to make money off our backs. 

 

I think when they will have 45000 stores asking them to pay what they owe us, or else possible class action suite, they will take notice and will change their behavior.

 

Also, when SW went into a partnership with HP to develop & test their new 3D printer, what did they do ? They took the hundreds of thousands of models designed for nylon SLS of SW designers and used a lot of them as a free library to test and develop that new technology, without any money or royalties paid to all those designers for the use of their valuable creations. They basically used all of these people's designs as if it was a public library. In my view a violation of the copyrights of thousands of creators. Now they'll probably say that they have a term that says they may use our models  "for the internal testing and educational purposes of Shapeways and Shapeways manufacturing partners".

 

Though they made a few people sign for a Beta test in the last phase, they did that  only After they were already using people's models without such agreement since a while. But SW designers NEVER signed to have SW use their models to help a billion $ corporation develop a new technology for their own profit. And there there was no such line in their terms when I signed for opening shops.

Now, due to all the nonsense SW is doing with freezing our earnings and making things lots more complicated for us when we have to file taxation reports (since they freeze them, even though we have already earned that money and it belongs to us the day the sale was made), the change rates for PayPal for US to Canadian $ & other currencies becomes all wrong because by the time they finally wire us our money (it can be weeks, months or a year depending on your situation) the change rate will already have changed and by then we may not even be in the same taxation year anymore... This forces us to report these amounts due as write off. However I spoke to someone who studied accounting (and now graduated) and to the tax office about this, and here's where it gets funny : actually what we should do as store owners when they freeze our money is to send Shapeways in collection after x amount of time (you decide, it's your business, can be 15 days, 1 month, etc) if they don't send you your money. Yes you got it right : send Shapeways accounts to a collection agency.

 

Now if 45000 store owners did that on a regular basis, you can bet SW would stop that practice of freezing our earnings ! But most store owners and designers are 20 something who wait tables at Starbuck or small self employed businesses of retired people (I generalize a bit but there are many) and don't seem to be well informed enough about accounting and business management to know about that. So SW is eating the wool off their back.

 

I suggest all people here who have a shop at SW and have frozen assets we all send SW in collection. If enough people do it they won't be able to close our stores over some imaginary 'violation' of terms, but even if they do it will make them think twice as it will visibly affect their credit rating if they don't pay us. That's the way business works and I am just applying it. They owe you money for too long ? You collect.

 

Don't be shy about it, it's Your earnings, Not theirs. Too bad for SW to have wanted to abuse us, I am just following gov't recommendations and accounting/business management practices. 

 

Equifax folks ! (or whatever other agency you choose). It's time to show them they are not the only ones who understand the rules of business. It just takes 1 person who send them to collection to light up the red button at the financial institutions and tip the balance. They might respond by closing his/her store. But when thousands will do the same they will no longer have a choice but to give us our monies. 

 

And if SW comes crying PayPal is supposedly charging them 'too much' for amount below 30$ (yeah right... you have 100$ million in financing including from Lux Capital, owner of most of the luxury brands you can think of, and our small earnings you can freeze them, "who cares"... their increases of profits are 'so' more important than us right ? 45000 store owners little-earnings with bills to pay...) then tell them to make a friggin deal with Paypal.

 

For a company that received so much money and now admitted publicly they screwed up & didn't charge the 'true' cost of 3D printing to make profit for the past 10 years, they look like a bunch of improvising amateurs, not a world class company by any standards. Putting them in collection is the only language they will understand. Trust me.

 

 

Edited by Stratospheremodels
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TL/DNR.....  You seem to have some serious issues. Let me give you a tip. 

 

If you want people on a forum to read your posts, make it short. Take it from there then.  As for this thread as it stands, dont care. 

Edited by Gerhard
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I don't know much at all about 3D printing technologies, but look at stuff being created by Lawrence Yang of KA-Models (the beautiful 3D printed exhaust nozzles). The detail and surface smoothness, not to mention the toughness of the resin printing he is using exceeds what I've seen done with FED and FUD from Shapeways. Like I said, I don't know much about these technologies so I don't know if the system used by Lawrence could be used for the type of parts done by Shapeways with overhangs and indents that might need supporting. I do think that the systems being used by Shapeways will eventually (if not already) be made obsolete and crude in comparison to new technologies. The parts that Lawrence makes are already more highly detailed, stronger and very competitively priced when compared to Shapeways parts.

It is only a matter of time before new technologies in the area of 3D printing allow new entrepreneurs to set up direct competitors to Shapeways. Shapeways will need to adapt and meet customer needs or die.

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Hi Mstor, 

 

I had a look at his creations and there are indeed very detailed parts on his website.

It would be interesting to see the parts firsthand before they are painted to see what type of resin he's using. There is a limited number of printers that can do these type of details and surface while remaining competitive. There are more 3D printers that can do better details and higher resolution than this but they are very expensive (material cost and maintenance, usually industrial SLA laser printers) or small desktop machines that print only very small objects rather slowly at extremely high resolution & are more expensive (specialized machines usually designed for jewellry).

 

SW's multi jetted printers can definitely handle this type of details (as for surface finish i can't comment as i have not had the chance to see his parts in person to compare), idem for most high resolution small desktop resin printers depending on their resolution. There are a variety of resins out there that can be used in small desktop machines, some are brittle and some are tougher. Some resins are better at doing small diameter details such as very fine sticks, but less good at doing engraved details such as rivets and panel lines, while for other resins it is the exact opposite.

 

SW also had a resin type SLA or DLP printer using a black resin which was very detailed and which I used as option for some of my models when one of their FED/FUD plastics price increase made those too expensive for my taste, but they removed that material from their catalog and now the only high resolution stuff they have is the (ex) FED/FUD plastic, which is a pity because the black resin was not affected by crystallization, but they had other issues with it (warped parts : people report SW didn't put enough stilt supports, something essential to counter warpage). 

 

His parts are probably made with a small or medium size desktop printer. DLP, SLA or LCD.

 

I am currently waiting for my own high resolution 3D printer which I have ordered earlier.

 

Note that Click-2-Detail was already doing exactly what SW and Lawrence are doing, but people say C2D went bust (they were using the same MJM printers as SW). A number of other scale model companies already do directly 3D printed model parts (train models, aircrafts) since a while. It's not new.

 

However the only thing that is driving price down now for small desktop printers is the expiration of patents from big companies which brought the open source mouvement. Any new tech will be locked in patents for decades, so, not likely to lower costs. So the current now mostly open source technology will be around for a while before we see any new affordable tech. It's the whole patents expiration thing that created the public boom for homemade 3D printers (FDM) and now SLA, DLP, etc. When tech is open it lower cost, when it's closed it increases cost.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Stratospheremodels
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Well, you certainly know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I am just going on what I have seen printed by SW and what I have in parts from KA-Models. I have had a number of items from SW printed in FUD and while good and relatively finely detailed, the surface textures, especially on undercuts where there was supporting wax were not the best (IMHO). Plus, all the cleaning one must go through before the parts can be used is quite inconvenient. I have a number of exhaust nozzles from KA-Models and am very impressed with the level of detail and smooth even surfaces. If you would like to know more about what Lawrence uses I would suggest contacting him directly. I have found Lawrence to be very responsive to e-mails (within reason). If you want to see his parts first hand, I'm afraid you're going to have to either buy some or find someone you know who can show them to you. You're not getting mine :gun:😉

Like I said, I don't know much about these technologies. I only know what I see. I hope that the 3D printing technologies available to creators of aftermarket parts (this is a model forum after all) continue to evolve and get better. It would be a shame if patents were to hamstring these efforts.

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I just find the possibilities of the technology fascinating. I hope it keeps improving and we keep seeing really nice, and affordable, aftermarket parts. That's my only interest in this. If Shapeways is having problems I sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, right now they are the only place I know of that has a lot of the parts I want for my DeAgostini Millennium Falcon (which I have yet to start).

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Well, as a person that has parts available through their service, I find this subject interesting. To my knowledge I haven't had anyone have SERIOUS issues with the material once it's been thoroughly cleaned and painted. Not saying there isn't any, just that I'm not aware of them. I know there has been some bleeding of oils after painting if it wasn't totally cleaned and frosting before painting, but I think for most of that there is a solution out there. Having said that, I do hope if there are any issues with the material they are fixed.

 

But again, I just offer parts that I modeled because I needed them on a build of mine  and felt that others might find them useful. I don't intend it to be a money making business for myself, other than enough to maybe warrant buying more models to make more parts for and so on and so on. I find the ability to upload a model and not have to deal with any of the shipping, charging or any of that those issues very useful. If I were to start a "real business" for aftermarket parts I'd likely either invest in a real high quality printer so I'd have total control over all aspects of printing, quality control, shipping and customer satisfaction. As it is now, Shapeways handles all of that. I could see sub-contracting some of the parts of a business, but subbing out production, quality control, shipping and customer service doesn't seem like a good business model to make serious money. Just my 2 cents.

 

Bill

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Shapeways, awesome stuff!

Wow, that's a lot to read about and I refuse doing so, Stratosphere-guy.

Just reviewed Bruce Goorney's 1/48 3D bits for the Testors/Italeri Sled kit; his LSAR A1 nose correction looks spot-on!

 

710x528_25731192_13982286_1543265315.jpg

 

It's the best nose I've seen so far to correct the awful one coming with those kits. Perhaps you should check it, @JeffreyK for your forthcoming project.

There are four or five sets for the Sled.

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Don't worry Mstor, I don't want to get your KA parts 😅, I was just curious about the look of the surface of his parts before painting, that's all.

 

Back to topic, if you used FUD printed at about 28 microns resolution, I've used FED which is printed at 16 microns and can give a finer surface. There was a comparison between a small Form1 SLA desktop printer and SW's FED plastic printed with 3DSystems machines a few years ago and the parts were very close,  though the parts from the 3DSystems printer were still a bit better. But the crystal blooms, if you are affected, can ruin all that. If you read the SW forum thread i posted at the top there are links & references in it to several scale modeling forums where people have experienced the cristallization issue. One is either in the US or the UK and is a warship forum, there is a forum in Germany or Austria also (train models), there is also a chemist who posted on the SW forum that he's a member of a train model club on the West coast that have the largest indoor train diorama & said that many members there have had FED/FUD parts that cristallized.

 

I agree that doing all the 3D printing yourself, cleaning, packing, shipping is much more work, but not much different from resin casting. At least you don't have to make molds. The idea to use SW's  boutiques was to be able to sell product & have them shipped while you're sleeping & have much more time to design new products. But they were never able to truly offer instead they increased designers overhead (wasted time) heavily due to all the problems listed earlier. 

 

Stephane.

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15 hours ago, Doppelgänger said:

Shapeways, awesome stuff!

Wow, that's a lot to read about and I refuse doing so, Stratosphere-guy.

Just reviewed Bruce Goorney's 1/48 3D bits for the Testors/Italeri Sled kit; his LSAR A1 nose correction looks spot-on!

 

710x528_25731192_13982286_1543265315.jpg

 

It's the best nose I've seen so far to correct the awful one coming with those kits. Perhaps you should check it, @JeffreyK for your forthcoming project.

There are four or five sets for the Sled.

 

Don't worry, we've been in touch already. The problem is that much of what's aft of the nose on the Testors kit is off as well so any part designed for the Testors kit will be wrong for a correct model (except wheels perhaps). At its time it was the best possible effort though....

J

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2 hours ago, JeffreyK said:

 

The problem is that much of what's aft of the nose on the Testors kit is off as well so any part designed for the Testors kit will be wrong for a correct model. 

 

Hi Jeffrey! :wave:

Exactly! 

It’s so good that you’d noticed about it, Jeff! Having been toying round with Bruce’s 3D view option on the Shapeways page, I’ve perceived that the shape where his correction nose is to join the kit’s forward fuselage lacked the much more pronounced round shape which is present on the real thing.

 Here’s Bruce’s nose 3D view in which you are able to turn the thing round in every direction you please. The picture looks aft of the nose forward, where the bulkhead would be.

 

yq1BtT2.jpg

 

I totally suck at Photoshop; can’t even dream of ever draw a curve, but the red arrows mark where the curve in the fuselage should be a lot more round and, as Jeffrey says, this is the shape present in the Testors/Italeri kit fuselage aft of the nose, so, in order to accentuate the shape of the curve on the resin correction, one would have to correct the whole shape in the kit as well.

Just to show what I’m talking about, this is how the correct shape of the (ASARS) nose and forward fuselage looks like in the real thing.

 

mdFdlsM.jpg

 

Here’s one pic looking from the side; check the distinctive boundary line of the ASARS nose with the rest of the forward fuselage. See how much more pronounced the shape is?

 

v1L5QwJ.jpg

 

All in all; Bruce's bit is quite okay. But, in view of his forthcoming project, I’m really glad that @JeffreyK had also noticed about this issue.

Cheers,

 

Onigiri

 

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14 hours ago, Stratospheremodels said:

Don't worry Mstor, I don't want to get your KM parts 😅, I was just curious about the look of the surface of his parts before painting, that's all.

 

Stephane,

I'll see if I can't take a decent pic of one of the nozzles and post it here. Not as good as having one in your hands to look at, but you'll get the idea.

 

Onigiri,

I don't know diddly squat about the SR-71. All I know is that I start to drool whenever I see picks of them and the thought of Jeffrey making a kit does things to me that I cannot mention in polite company. :whistle:

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2 hours ago, Mstor said:

Onigiri,

I don't know diddly squat about the SR-71. All I know is that I start to drool whenever I see picks of them and the thought of Jeffrey making a kit does things to me that I cannot mention in polite company. :whistle:

 

Markey! :yahoo:

Howdy, bru? Well, rest assured that Hypersonic Models 1/48 SR-71 kit is bound to be an excellent kit. I've been trying to correct the Testors/Italeri kit for almost 10 years now, but even though there have been several companies who've dedicated time to its improvement (Cutting Edge, True Details, Loon Models, Metallic Details, etc), there's always something which needs correction, such as the shape of the windshield at the base, where it meets the fuselage.

It's high time we had a correct injection-molded kit of this iconic aircraft in 1/48th scale, and Jeffrey will make it possible for us, I'm really confident because I've been following his progress, and I can see that he's really aware of what the issues about the Testors kit are.

Cheers,

 

Onigiri 

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7 hours ago, Doppelgänger said:

It's high time we had a correct injection-molded kit of this iconic aircraft in 1/48th scale, and Jeffrey will make it possible for us, I'm really confident because I've been following his progress, and I can see that he's really aware of what the issues about the Testors kit are.

 

Yea, I was very happy wen I heard about Jeffrey's planned kit.

 

But, we've stolen Stephane's thread. Sorry man. Still need to get you some photos. (need to write myself notes, esle I forget everything, age).

 

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