As per Woody's suggestion I'm opening up a topic here for you to discuss your thin wall issues.
The wall thicknesses per material:
White, Transparent & Black Detail: 1mm
White, Strong & Flexible: 0.7mm (I would personally always keep to and recommend 1mm).
Cream Robust: 1mm
Stainless Steel(depends)
There are a number of issues with regards to wall thickness:
1. Our filters are not good at checking them at the moment so your model might upload OK but once it is ordered we might still reject it.
2. Some models that have successfully been printed previously are currently being rejected due to thin walls.
3. With Stainless Steel it is difficult to determine wall thickness and if the model will print ahead of time.
4. It is difficult to measure wall thickness in a lot of modeling tools.
1. We are improving our filters and will get a major update to the wall thickness filter within two weeks. Additional updates will follow and each will make the problem a little less likely to occur.
2. We apologize for rejecting previously printed models. We should have communicated this better and in advance. We should also have been clearer to you. We screwed this up.
What has happened is the following: initially we were very experimental and wanted to help everyone push the envelope of 3D printing. We therefore printed models that might fail and happily printed them a few times if they did fail. We tried until we got it right and then sent that model to the customer. As more and more orders flowed in this became more and more difficult to do. A failed model is another process, another set of steps that one person has to undertake. These experimental models cost us money in the extra hours in materials and handling spent on them. They disrupt the normal flow of things from digital to your object. Production people gradually started to become more stringent on the 'printability' of a model. This to keep the ever increasing torrent of orders flowing to you. There are only so many hours in a day and they chose the path of getting the most orders out of the door in time. At the same time we generally became less adventurous and experimental. Whereas initially we were focused on pushing the envelope, we are now more focused on process optimization and keeping costs down. The goal after all is to make 3D printing as inexpensive as can be. To eventually turn 3D printing into a technology that everyone can use to make everything. Before we were completely aware of it we were rejecting models that we should not have rejected and becoming too boring. We don't want to be boring.
Over the coming two weeks we will reevaluate our criteria for accepting and rejecting models. We will strive to find the right balance between the optimal process and pushing 3D printing forward into the unexplored. We apologize for our poor communication on this matter.
3. Stainless Steel is a new material and process, there are no design rules. By Saturday I will put a tutorial live giving you a more in depth look into what will and will not work with Stainless Steel. This process however is likely to remain a 'hit or miss' one for some months. I hope however to give you significantly more clarity and information.
4. We are currently evaluating several tools that you can use to check wall thicknesses. Once we are done testing them we will do a blog post about the tool(s) that is(are) up to spec. I hope to be able to do this by Saturday but can not be sure.
To sum up:
by November 4th we will have a new wall thickness check live for you that will help in ameliorating this problem.
By November 4th we will have reevaluated our rejection guidelines and hopefully stuck the right balance between experimenting and cost.
By October 24th I will publish more information about the Stainless Steel guidelines.
Hopefully by October 24th we will have completed evaluating a suitable tool for wall thickness checking.
If you have a wall thickness issue, tell us about it below. Also, if you have any ideas, or concerns that we have not addressed, please tell us also.
Joris