Hi all, I am currently designing a lapel pin. The customer would like it to be about 3/4" in length and done in a polished silver, I have completed the model and uploaded it but I am getting thin wall issues. Mostly due to the thin parts of the text due to those lines. I am wondering what I can do to fix this without hurting the logos design. Obviously it needs to stick to the original design as it is promoting a company. If I bring the extruded lines up closer to the top of the text will that help at all? Any suggestions will be appreciated. This is my first time coming to a 3rd party print company for getting the job done so I am a little out of touch.
First off don't make a row of 1's across the bottom. P N da A. 2nd, congratulations you have just entered the world of design constraints! Now you know to evaluate logos and other models for minimum thickness and acute angles. About the only thing you can do without dramatically changing the logo is scale up the part, also order in raw silver if possible or you may be on course to learn about production polishing and loss of detail. Thing will probably pass raw castings at about 2 inches,.. you can always test scale a model to start to get a feel for the thin wall threshold. Sorry to be so abrupt, it's late and I'm doing my own model checks. Good luck! -S
Thanks for your reply Shea_Design, also thanks about the 1's, I wasn't sure what was causing it, either way, my signature was full of 1's. Sorry I will try working with raw silver and scaling up Is the raw silver pretty shiny as well?
The raw silver is nice and bright when new, it slowly takes on a red tone, as does polished silver. You can always run one and see what you get but you might end up polishing them yourself or outside of SW polishing pipeline if you get over-polished parts. Also polishing just the raised text could make the logo pop, while the textured raw portion will patina over time, or by post production techniques you can read about and see here via search). You could also try a bas relief style of artwork, the features will not read as walls and may hold up to polishing if exaggerated in the model. Look at my border collie pendants for example. Cheers, -S
Is there any recommendations as a different type of material to use to test that the Silver will pass? I have made adjustments to the Pin and it now passes the Auto Check. Being that this is my first venture with Shapeways, I am a little worried and would like to verify the design is going to work for the customer. Raw silver is coming in at $75, while the customer is not worried about that pricing, purchasing multiple pins and having them not pass manual checks would be devastating. Id love to see if you or anyone may have some suggestions on what I can do next. Is it rare that the manual check fails? is there something such as stainless steel that could be purchased first, if it passes manual and the print looks good than most likely silver will be the same? Thanks so much for all of your time! Chris,
Brass and Bronze are also cast using the same production pipeline; wax, slurry, burnout & pour but the price will not drop all that much due to the number of steps, aka labor. If you have not already hollowed out the backside I'm sure you can get the unit price down. Shelling can be tricky business so hopefully you have a good approach if applicable. -S