Um... basically: a really small bead. I am curious because I've been into hand-made crafts for the past half-year and for some unknown reason I cannot find any white or red 3mm beads that aren't pearlescent or don't have large enough holes. I am considering Shapeways as a solution to my bead dilemma, but I'd like to know if these dimensions are possible first. I also suck at modeling and have no clue how to get things to scale. Attached is an STL file of a single bead if anyone wants to take a look at it. Thanks for looking!
Well if your doing wsf, your walls have to me at least .7mm. But your min bounding box is 7.5mm (x+y+z), but if your bead has a diameter of 3mm, it'd only have to be at least 1.5mm tall. So yes it should be printable as long as you follow these rules.
3mm diameter = 3mm tall A 3mm diameter sphere will have a bounding box of 3 x 3 x 3 mm = 3+3+3 = 9mm, so is good for the specs, however a bead with a hole will have one axis shy of 3mm. An alternative to buying in one bead of those dimension is to have many beads on a string or in a box - the string/box is part of the model file too - this will help keep the individual bead price down too. Looking at the model file, a 1.27mm dia hole may be a bit small for a string without fusing the (0.7mm) string to the beads, but putting a hundred or so in a box/cage will keep the unit price down. Paul [hr]stop4stuffModeller for hireShapeways ShopTwitterYouTube[hr]
Thanks for the advice! I managed to duplicate the bead 200 times without going over the 1 million polygon limit. I did a couple tweaks to the file too (made the hole bigger) and just kept uploading the file to Shapeways until the numbers on the product page looked right. Hopefully it works out!