I have never been so happy of getting through 4 + days of search for 1:500 scale items in Shapeways pages. Not find finding find 1-500 in the same group and finding same duplicates of same items in the same search over and over. I had to use my Notebook program to save my search items. I felt I wasted too much time to search efforts in Shapeway very poor search engine. Ps. If any modelers have or can make 1:500 items only for me, please contact me. I need air crafts, airport accessories, cargo, shipping containers, all type of vehicles (construction/cranes) and , people and architecture items. Hopefully in bright yellow for a special project I am doing. Most of the items I have are scaled down paper models over wood and not to scale (Please see attachments), I want to do over. Some like cars and shipping containers I need in hundreds, so looking for special discount on quantities. I live in Thailand and hoping to get many in the same shipping, as the cost is very expensive. capthooksthai@yahoo.com
You could do a google search instead, e.g. "1/500 1:500 site:shapeways.com". Part of the problem however is that there is at least one seller who abuses the system by providing an enormous list of non-pertinent keywords including a dozen scales when there is only one actually available. (You will know already who I mean - the google search apparently relegates his models to page 15 onwards). That said, while 1:500 does not appear to be particularly popular the google search found shops by "Ngineer","Speed" and "adammurphy94" that have aircraft and ramp equipment and a number of other items like trees are available in other shops (switch to "image view" of the search results to get an overview). You could also try locating the models you need in whatever scale - at least one of the shops I mentioned has more in 1:400 - and inquire about a rescaled version. Bright yellow will not be available - the only practical material at that scale would be a clear acrylic resin - but the materials are readily paintable. Quantity discounts might be a problem as well - unlike injection molding where a huge upfront cost for the mold is spread the more thinly the more you produce, with 3d printing each part costs essentially the same to make no matter how many there are in total. The primary cost saver is usually to join many small parts together on a sprue or in a cage so that the human labor cost is reduced to handling a single macroscopic item rather than a dozen of tiny ones.