FUD inconsistencies

Hello guys,

My first experience with UD and FUD has been one of joy. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry on the way here.

I received my UD and FUD items and was surprised to find the support material (yellow wax) was attached.

The weird thing is, I got an email from the QA department stating;
"As you can see they turned out a bit yellow. This is no problem if you were to paint these. If this is not your attention, we will reprint these for you."

The problem appears to be that they have not been cleaned.



This shows the difference between normal FUD (center) and the ones I cleaned (top left and right) against the uncleaned ones. They were easy enough to clean with a bit of alcohol, but how did they get through production, skip cleaning and the the QA guy doesn't realise that they are still unclean?

That said, they turned out lovely!

Cheers!

My trial model buses in FUD had the same problem. Now the models are quite delicate, and I make allowance that they might be just too delicate for Shapeways to clean thoroughly without damage. However, I will not follow through with the models for the time being, as there is no way I could offer models for sale, and have them arrive to customers in that condition. I will await and see how FUD works out in time.

This is the interesting thing. The DVI was done in UD and is comparatively huge. Why it wasn't clean I don't know.

I was also very aggressive with my cleaning, got right in there with a stiff paintbrush and it came straight on off.

Isn't UD supposed to require no manual cleaning? At least the posts talked about using an oven to melt the wax away, instead of water and tools like with WD, BD or TD. Well, maybe they ment "most of the wax melts, thin coat can still be over the surface".

Well when I picked them up, they felt very greasy to the touch. I tried scraping the wax away on the back of the DVI and there was probably .3 of a mm of wax!

I then started picking at the wax with a dentist tool and that didn't work. Tried a wax remover, that didn't have much affect. Alcohol dissolved it instantly though!

The reason the DVI looks a touch darker is I used a coarse black plastic brush. While effective, it stained it a slightly darker hue. The stiff paintbrush was very effective though.