Shapeways, is this possible?

I was commissioned to make some what I originally thought were beads since I make them but them I realized that although these are beads, these are tiny little beads that she wants to hang using a small fishing line through a 1mm vertical hole with some carved wooden pieces in the middle and at the end. These will be hollow pieces she wants me to design, but the problem is she wants to hanging per ear ring and I don't want to give her a quote if this is not possible. Total will be 4 skull beads at 9mm - 10mm each.

What material? FUD should be no problem at all, WSF will likely have some impacted powder that can be cleaned easily with a drill bit. I don't personally have enough info on stainless and silver to know how well a hole that deep will clear, Maybe WiWa can shed some light on Stainless and silver.

WOW. I forgot to mention the issue im having with it. This is going to be done in silver and printing them as 4 separate prints is too expensive with there being a $30-$35 handling fee plus price of silver weight. These are too small to be done separately, thats $120 just for the handling fee plus price of silver weight. Theyre gonna be hollow, thin and small. I wanted to know if this will count as natural pairs. She plans on stringing them together with thin fishing wire. Its gonna be from top to bottom. wood - skull - wood - skull - bottom cap but I dont want to start on this one if its not possible to do all 4 as 1 .stl print.

I'd say no to 4 in 1 file. Especially if the pieces are below the minimum size individually. Any chance to connect them in some way, that you can trim off and polish? (pretty easy to do with some wire cutters)

Be sure to be patient with Customer Services if you go the multi part sprue route with Silver - it doesn't always work and until feedback comes from the production partners. there's next to no insight as to how it can work - been there and boy can it get frustrating.

Paul

This is a tricky situation. I don't deal with silver and I am out of my expertise on this. I will talk to our Materials Manager and see what the limitations are for either spruing things together or getting multiple parts in an stl.

I talked to our materials manager and he says that you should sprue them together the extra cost of material will be more than offset by the reduced start up cost.

Yeah, thanks everyone. Looks like connecting them is the best option in this situation. How big are the sprues supposed to be for good casting? 3mm?

Yeah that's a good question, what size to make the sprues?

One thing I've noticed is the larger the item is the more economical it is to produce in sterling silver. In this situation it might not be economical to do those four beads alone, however, if you attach a few more items in there, some of your rings for example, then it would be more than economical, cuz you'd actually be saving money to have those other items printed, which you could then private sell to get your money back.

Hell, we could even all ban together and have a group buy! We could send Shapeways a great big ball of sprued up parts and save big! HAHAHA! :laughing:

Yeah, thought of that, but since my models are at 950,000 polygons, if I reduce the poly count the detail will be compromised.

Do you really need 950,000 polygons for such small objects? I imagine you could actually reduce the mesh quite a bit without loosing any details.

AH HA! I didn't think of that! :laughing:

Yeah, I but fully knew of the limitation. I have a recumbent bike design that I had abandon cuz of running out of polygons. Also, my headphone cufflinks, the one with four sets of headphones is stretched way thin on polygons.

All the more reason to get into doing our own castings. I've been contemplating this and calculated that it would be about half the cost of having Shapeways do them for most items. But Shapeways is so darn convenient! Well, minus the having to wait a month!

For a small project like this one I won't go anywhere near 950,000. I was refering to my other, more finer detailed models. I can't attach/sprue-on any models to those to save cost. Since these beads are small w/less detail, I will be able to attach 4 together. What is the minimum size for a sprue?

The minimum wire thickness is 0.8mm for silver. I would start there and use 2 short lengths between each bead to help prevent breaking before casting.