Thank you very much for your feedback.
Let me try to develop some points.
As you understood, the "Clean It Yourself" option for an object would make you receive 3 things:
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[*]a thin shell (the Kinder yellow egg), with inside
[*]some support material
[*]your object (the Kinder surprise)
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Recycling the support material
One argument is: Shapeways is recyling the support material, so sending it with the object would be a non-sense for them.
I do not think so. If the support material is, say 10 cent per cubic centimeter, and if Shapeways make you pay 10 cent per cc, there is no loss for Shapeways, whether they recycle or not. That is not the fact of sintering the support material that makes its price raise from 10 cent to $1.5 but the time spent by the machines and the time spent by the operators. Put in another way, even if Shapeways would have to buy some extra support material that would be delivered to you, it would not make the average price of the object raise, as long as you pay for this extra material of course.
By the way, I do not know if its true, but in another post it is said that 80% of the support material is lost: if its true, each time you buy 1 cc of material, you also pay for the 4 cc that are thown away (once again, not a big issue: it should be relatively inexpensive), so you can ask for some :laughing:
Throwing the support material away
The consumer is already thowing away a lot of things: the corrugated box, the polystyren flakes, the buble wrap... For me, the main issue is "Is the constumer ready to open the shell and clean up the object?" and, as I said in my first post I do not think so.
I was more thinking about us: when we buy for ourselves a prototype $10 to test our object, if our markup is say $2, we will have to sell 5 of them to break even (10 if we made a mistake in your 1st prototype, and need another one). Having a less expensive option for our prototypes would be more than interesting.
Price of the shell
It has been said the volume of the shell is not negligible. That's right. But it does not necessarly imply that the price of the shell would not be negligible either. That's because the current pricing scheme would have to change.
For example it could be
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[*]proportional to the volume of the actual object (as for now) excluding the shell and the support material but slighty less expensive per cc (say -25%),
[*]or only depending on the bounding volume (volume of the shell+support material+object) but at, say, half the current price per cc,
[*]or a combination of these two.
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Now, why could it be less expensive? Because less human handling would be necessary.
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[*]it would be easier to find the object in the powder
[*]there will be no more need to put together the sub-parts of a puzzle
[*]no more time spend to figure out which object is this (some pieces are so similar that it can be confusing): it's writen on the shell
[*]no more need to remove the powder from inside a hollowed object
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So yes it would be more work for us, but if it allow a significant price cut, it can be worthful.