Wall thickness verses surface detail

Hello

I'm having trouble with the customer service team in New York (I think) and their interpretation of the design guidelines about when a surface detail becomes a wall. This is the offending model, the problem parts are in red.

They are 0.5x0.5x10.2 mm. They are being rejected because of their length (10.2mm), not their height (0.5mm).

The material in question is WSF.

According to these guidelines they qualify as surface detail.


During my 'discussion' with the team I was directed to this tutorial.
https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/thin_walls_tutorial

All well and good, apart from this diagram, which is a mess.

There is even a note above it admitting that the dimensions on the left are wrong. The dimensions on the right are blurred and therefore useless. If this is being used as the basis for judging our models then it is no wonder they are being rejected. Can someone at Shapeways please sort this mess out and give us some proper guidelines that can't be interpreted in several different ways.

Rant over, thank you and goodnight.

Neil.

edit : a key problem here could be the use of the terms 'height' and 'length'. It's not clear how they should be applied.

This is another example of an incompetent employee making errant rejections and causing havoc. The length of the detail has nothing whatsoever to do with thin walls. I'd respond with something like, "So, if I made it into one long line of cursive text would it still be rejected?" HAHA!

Is Mitchell Jetten the person in charge of the printability evaluation team? He's always been extremely competent in these matters so I assume by now that he must have been promoted to management. We need to find out who is managing this branch so that when someone posts something like this in the forum we can have someone to direct them to.

Your experience is not unique. I have had the same issue. I just made the detail thicker and re-uploaded- I've tried arguing and hit a wall (a detail?)

IS SHAPEWAYS READING THIS?

Dave Yale

I'm surprised anyone can read this with all this spam about! I expect most at Shapeways are out of the office until next year, so don't expect a quick resolution.
In this instance making the detail part thicker is not a problem, and I've already done that. The problem is this sort of decision will affect lots of other details that can't be made thicker because it will ruin the models. So ultimately this nonsense needs sorting out.

Maybe we could also upload optional reference drawings with notes to indicate specifics of detail/wall/decoration so the checkers can know what the designer thinks is important and not important.

Had exactly the same issue, detail rejected as wall thickness even on printed before models.

My suggestion that the checker looks at the designers history to see at what level the designer is at, I now get a bit frustrated at being treated as somebody who has just designed my first model with standard rejection emails. That also means I do not know everything and can make mistakes but hopefully these are getting fewer all the time.

I think the word I want is "Predictability." I don't care how shapeways evaluates my models, I just want to know what the process is so I can design in conformance to it. On a FUD model we are not talking new technology anymore so the design specs should be fairly set.

And if Shapeways is going to change something (like the 2mm sprue rule in SWF when 1.2mm had been suggested previously) I would like to know about it. Email is cheap. Having a customer order cancelled because there has been a design guideline change, or design guideline interpretation change, is not so cheap.

OK, rant mode off.

@pinddile Did anyone ever explain why the feature on your model was a wall and not a detail?

Dave Yale

Dave, the reason given was because if its length (10.2mm).

Neil B.

Since this 'rejection' I've had four of my models go from 'first to try' to 'a successfully printed product'.
You probably won't be surprised to learn they they all contain the same part featured in my first post.

Know the feeling well

Yet more successful prints, and no word from Shapeways on this issue. Perhaps it's been quietly buried.
Here is my interpretation of the hand drawn diagram in post 1.

I could be wrong, but it's what I think it should look like. Does this make sense?

I'm experiencing very similar problems in the last couple of months. For example, I made some non-structural changes, (rearranged the faces of a 20 sided die,) to a model that has been printed 134 times with no failures in the last 5 years, and the new upload is being rejected at the manual check phase. I uploaded the same model as part of a set in November and it was immediately accepted. Since then it has been printed 5 times with no failures.
At some point in the last few months there has been a change in how models are being evaluated, and some very sound files are being rejected.