custom jeweler?

Hi,

I have something I'd like to get made. It's a small rectangle, hollowed out. Think of a small fridge, with a couple portholes in the front.

I would like it to be around 5 -6 inches.

I would like to be able to have it made in 3 different materials....all metal. Something like black metal, polished bronze, and premium silver.

The metals don't matter too much, as long as they are in incremental value. They are prize rewards, so like, bronze, silver, gold type of thing.

Anyway, To get a 3 inch model through shapeways in premium silver, it's about 2k (even hollowed out). That I can't do.

So, a couple questions:

If I had the model done by shapeways made in wax:
- could I take that wax model to a jeweler to make...even though it isn't technically jewelry?
- would they make it?
- would I save a lot?
- would the wax printout from shapeways be good enough to get a very polished item from the jeweler, or would the wax model still have print lines on it (my 3d model is very high res).

Answers to those questions and any other advice on how to do what I'd like would be great.

Thx!

Best to ask the jeweler(s) you have in mind for this job - you are unlikely to save much on raw material cost, and the main factor in "premium silver" pricing is the labor cost of professional manual polishing. As far as I remember from the introductory blog posting on brass,bronze and precious metals, shapeways' cast metals are actually produced by a jeweler in the vicinity of their NY factory.
Any jeweler with experience in lost wax casting will probably also know how to smooth the surface of a wax master if necessary.

Yeah, you'll need to communicate with a jeweler or a casting house about that. They will want to know about the details of the geometry of the design so that they can determine if the design is castable. The main issue has to do with metal flow, but there are other issues like, will parts of the investment break off during casting and ruin the casting? And no, they wouldn't care if it isn't jewelry. They can actually make anything from metal that is small and can be lost wax cast.

One thing I can tell you straight off is Shapeways cannot print that in wax because it is too large. The maximum bounding box for Shapeways' wax material is 75 × 75 × 50 mm. Although, you could make it in sections and these could be joined together.

Print lines are not really much of an issue at that scale. The print lines would be at 16 microns on center, which are so small at that scale that they could easily be polished out.

Yes, you would save a lot! Shapeways is more like the 7-11 of 3D printing, they are convenient, but not inexpensive. In case you're not in the United States, 7-11s are mini markets that are open 24 hours a day seven days a week and they are everywhere so they are very convenient.

Now, having said all that, are you sure 3D printing is the way to go for this? This could be made by a silversmith from silver or sterling silver sheet and simply soldered to form the shape you want. When finished it would look exactly like a casting, but it would be much cheaper to do since there would be a lot less work. If you were going to do it this way I'd contact some silversmiths and see what they would quote you. Oh and, you might even look around on Etsy. Lot's of artists on Etsy regularly take custom orders.

Let us know how it's going.

ok thanks a lot, that's what I was looking for, other, cheaper options.

Did you find the price and brass and gold plated brass to be too high as well?

Yes.

There will be about 60 cm3 of material, so polished brass and gold plated brass both come out to over 1k.

Youch. I was going to suggest brass bronze and gold plated, but yea that's still a chunk of change.