Preventing Rejections - Update on Project Caterpillar

It is a good suggestion, and I believe may even have been suggested before in one of these myriad threads - what is missing from these discussions is any meaningful, official, response from Shapeways ... imo.

Apparently, yes. The text has been changed, there no longer is a detailed discussion about thin wires.

They could have announced it more prominently, though.

Greetings
Dragoman

Yes indeedy, wires or bars are no longer considered walls, and therefore do not have the same 'rules' as walls - or is someone made a blanket decision for FUD that should be applied to FD?

Hey ho, once again what worked without any reported issues now does not work due to whatever issues weren't reported :confused
Had it myself with customers FUD models recently

Paul

Cheers mate!

Wish they'd update the page https://www.shapeways.com/design-rules/frosted-detail (like with some explicit ones ex. 1:3 wire thickness:length ratio; or where should they start measuring them structures... unless I missed it somewhere)

Chalk more tiny ships unavailable :/

Best regards,
RoeT

..........

1: All communications between shapeways and customers should be anonymously forwarded to the shop owner so that he or she is aware of everything, it is not only shapeways shop and reputation that's on the line !

2: When there are problems with a model ordered by a customer shapeways will put the order on hold with consent of the customer to give the designer the chance to fix the problem (rapid prototyping)

= Customer happy, Shop owner happy and Shapeways happy


Just do it

Hi,

I'm really tired of getting mails saying "You've sold models which could not be 3D printed".
Especially the silver material seems to be very complicated.

It's fine for me that a design has to go along with the material rules...
but today I've got a rejection which says "minimal 1,5 mm for this particular model", instead of the usual 0.6 / 0.8 mm.
This way rules make no sence and you never know if your design will be printed or not. I think I'll no longer offer the silver material option in my shop.

Michael

Seeing your beautiful designed products this could happen to anyone :cry:

With both shops I'm running i didn't have a lot rejections overall but still I'm scared every time someone places an order.
Maybe it's a good suggestion to leave the "Yippee!" from the "you've sold models" notification ?

Just some more ideas that would help to dissolve these issues a little bit :

3: There should be an option to thoroughly check prototypes i order for sale in my shops to ensure they can be (mass) produced in the material i choose, i would even pay a fee for that !

4: When the design rules change the material should be locked and the shop owner should be notified to check if the design rules are affecting the producability of the model.

Hi all

Have not read every post in this thread, but have had rejects with a few designs lately , first I want to make clear that my rejections were valid.
I mainly sell models in silver, well when I do sell any , Not being a expert in design, looking at some of the rejects posted some are valid,
You need to remember with silver , it,s a 3 step process, designs are first printed in wax , then loss wax cast in silver, then finished . And the fishing can be a mixture to mass finishing and hand finishing.

Some points.
1 . Mass finishing means a machine does the finishing , I.e the piece get placed in a machine, turned on , then removed ... No control over what gets material gets removed . Hand finishing is a little more selective .... The thing to keep in mind is .2mm or more can be removed from all surfaces at each stage If you have a surface detail that's only .283, you can end up with no detail left... You need to allow for finishing in your design .... The problem is you either have to design a different model for each version of silver or just accept that the each type of silver will look a little different and design in and extra .2 mm I.e if I want detail to end up .3mm I'll design it at .5mm , then I know the final piece will be some where between .51 and .28mm. ..
And it not so straight forward sometimes small details can be protected by other details, so you can get a way with detail .283
I guess the main thing is to allow for polishing, it will remove material every where....


2. Your design needs to allow for sprue placement, this is the biggest problem I've seen with some of the designs I've seen post here.
If you have a design that has detail over every surface you don't leave any where for the sprue to be attached .

Also The pressure of the investment will bend the wax if there is not enough support. .

Having worked directly with casters, 90% casters will only place 1 sprue on a design, if your design needs " runners" to support the design that's upto the designer. This is where the process falls over because there is not a method of telling shapeways what is part of the final design and what is sprue / runner which can be removed.

Just recently I had a caster make a bangle from 4.1 mm round wax, 60mm diameter , now I only had 1 x 4mm sprue and no runners and the final cast bent out of shape. No big issue nothing a hammer can't fix. For me. But for shapeways it would eat into profit for the 1 piece. And the wax I used is a lot stronger then wax used in 3d printers

My guess, it it could be way off and not being able to see the back of the above ring, is there might not be enough area to attach a sprue, the more silver that needs to flow into the design the larger the sprue needs to be.the design has lots of changes from thick to thin which could have flow issue Just a guess

I GIVE UP. Seriously. I am taking every single model that I have in FUD and setting it as not for sale. I admit, this is probably what Shapeways wants. I don't think they want to support that material any more. They find new 'problems' in every single model that has been sold in the past four months and I'm tired of it. If there is a new material with 'better' detail later, I may come back. Hasta la Vista Shapeways.

Hmmm... seems they've taken down that particular page... quite alarming as it'll mean rejection for all my FUD-exclusive models... (0.8mm FUD wires seriously? )

Yep. If I want to put mullions into a window through a wall they need to be three times the thickness of the wall. Oh, and they have to be 0.8mm in all three dimensions. I had some L-braces that worked for a while by being 0.8mm on each leg with 0.3mm walls, then they started rejecting them by measuring them from arbitrary points inside the corner.

with you there Roy, previously printed models with small walls now rejected due to someone's arbitary interpretaion of 'the rules' = sucks for us trying to explain to CS that the model has been printed already without any reported issues....

Maybe I'll sign in again next month if there's been any changes to Shapeways policy of arrogance.

Paul

For those who are interested, this thread complaints has been locked and re-directed here.

I originally posted this on another thread. It was pointed out that it was more appropriate on this thread:

It's become a wack-a-mole game. A model printed successfully, you make it available, a customer orders it, it won't print and you fix the error and re-upload it. Another customer orders it, and it won't print for another reason. You fix it, and there's another problem. It's the mole jumping up in another hole and you keep bashing. [I see this has been expressed previoulsy in this thread]

I cannot say Shapeways is wrong. Unfortunately by printing these designs in the past they "lured" me into some sloppy habits and enabled me to push the design limits a little too hard. I am in the process of going through all my designs and reworking them.

Lately I get a new rejection- shells that aren't attached. However they are (except one that was my oops). My understanding was that intersecting shells were OK (and they printed OK in the past). Now I am no longer sure, and the topic doesn't seem covered in the materials guidelines. I have just ordered some new models that have intersecting shells- we will see what happens.

My thoughts at this point is to only order prints myself, and after I have the physical model in my hands sell it on ebay. It totally defeats the zero inventory, just in time production process that shapeways makes possible, but I just look like an idiot when a customer orders a model and gets an email that it can't be printed.

I also pointed out to customer service that a "square" wire that measures .88 has an equal cross section to a 1 mm round "wire." No luck.

And no one can tell me when a wall is too narrow and becomes a wire. With FUD that can make a huge difference.

And another thing- as long as we are complaining- breakage during shipping should be an non-issue. As part of my intent to sell my models on ebay I ordered cotton filled cardboard jewelry boxes. About .40 each by the case.



This is an example of some rolltop desk and chair models I have produced in FUD (and have been trying to get to print again ever since) in a jewelry box. Yes, some are painted, others are half painted- these were tests.

But I think the production model will get to the customer OK when they are sold on Ebay, and have this box put into a flat rate box.

I suggested to Shapeways that they could offer packaging like this for $1, prevent breakage, and make a little bit extra on the mark up in response to the survey they sent around a while ago, but didn't hear anything back.

I understand we want everything fixed today, and that is is not that easy when you are not only growing a buisness, you are growing a technology. But the Shapeways to designer communications could be better.

The real problem is, that ShapeWays doesn't seem to care about communicating their intents until you have ordered something that they then decide to reject. I've had Mrs Hagens do a manual check of models. She said they checked fine. But once someone, other than myself ordered them. ShapeWays kicks it out. Locks the model for NO SALE, turns off the materials selection and markup section. Then has the nerve to come to me and say,

"As at this moment we haven't got the possibility (yet) to put a model on private while doing the rejections, this hasn't been done automatically. This is something we are looking in to, that as soon as we are doing the rejections all the models which can't be printed will automatically get a restriction for the material we can't print it in. For now, the designer needs to put his model on private or a restriction on the materials and make the changes to the models and offer them for sale again. Of course I understand that this is something we have to provide and we are going to do this in the nearby future."

As if they haven't done it, But I watched as they did it. ShapeWays doesn't communicate it's intentions, or it's motives to others very well. It's as if we don't matter to them. Then when something happens, they expect you to just KNOW what they did and why. They dance around a simple answer as well as a seasoned politician in congress. They are experts at giving answers, without actually answering the question. And frankly it's starting to wear a bit THIN-walled.

This was the answer I got today about printable to now rejected models. Your going to love it, God knows I did.

"The Production Facility who checked the model in 2012 and printed this model as well unfortunately didn't check this model as strict as our own Production Facility does check them. We saw the notification that this model was printed before and if the model does meet the design rules or almost meets them, we always discuss this rejection with our Production Facility, but because the walls are really too thin this rejection was a valid one and we continued."

They've tightened up their guidelines so much, you couldn't breath thru a straw as they are now. You NOW have to design something for WSF for it to pass for FUD. And God help you if your designing for WSF material and want to use the dye feature. Used to be the same material as WSF. BUT, without telling a single soul in the universe. ShapeWays dumps that program to make dye now a POLISHED material. Again, CHANGING the guidelines without telling anyone.

I wouldn't mind some of what they have done. But dammit, COMMUNICATE that fact to me first. Just don't do it and then expect everyone to know what ShapeWays is thinking, and way. I ain't a mind reader. I got PMS, not ESP! ShapeWays has lost it's way. They are trying to so hard to top everyone else. They are changing their guidelines around. But yet THEY DON'T TELL ANYONE!

All of this, because I had a model that printed just fine last yr. Printed it several times. And WHAM! One day ShapeWays decides that my model no long works, shouldn't have been printed in the first place. I make corrections, upload the new model, it gets rejected, I make more corrections, it gets rejected, and I get so damm mad, I upload the last updated file, AS A NEW MODEL THAT NOW PRINTS! Turns out every rejection I got, was still using the original model to reject from. But the page showed that the updated file uploaded correctly and everything. And what is even more stupid. That first file of that model. I ordered 3 of them. They refunded all 3. But in the package was a set, IN WSF MATERIAL! The same material they kept rejecting it under. And not one person at ShapeWays has the guts to tell me "HOW A MODEL GETS PRINTED IN WSF, BUT REJECTED IN FUD, FD AND EVERYTHING ELSE!".

ShapeWays, YOU FAIL!

Or as Ann on "the Weakest Link" would say,

"Who's one Froot Loop shy of a full bowl?",
or
"You would be out of your depth in a car park puddle."
or
"Whose brain will be donated to science and rejected?"

Your's truely,

Samantha
aka Mechanoid

I think the words of the day should be the ones we hear at work daily:

ISO 9001
Total Quality Management
Six Sigma
Process Control
William Edwards Deming

I get the feeling Shapeways my have "winged" things early on and is now trying to get things under control. It might have been better to start with tighter design rules and loosen them up over time based on experience. But that's bridge under the water. I now try to design everything with the polished alumide rules to cover all plastics yet still seem to run into problems...
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=14874& amp;start=0&

Last week I had some pens come back with flat tops even though they had rounded tops in the design file. I don't know if it was something in the design file (the shell issue I keep reading about?) or something bad that happened during manufacture. Instead of wading through customer service I just redesigned the pens to have a flat top and sent out for revised parts since I also had another change adjustment I needed to make.

The nexus of thorough design rule checks needs to be at Shapeways for all processes, either in the form of online checking as part of the upload process or an open source rule check deck that can be utilized in various programs to do the checks before upload. .You shouldn't have to buy a part or have someone else buy a part to flag a design or manufacture issue. There should also be a good way to appeal flagged rule checks to improve the rule check deck when possible or a way to permanently sign off on an error to allow manufacture with the error if the designer feels it is a non-issue. However having a decent rule check process right from the get-go would pre-empt many of these problems!

Had a lovely couple of emails today that made very little sense. Rejections for new models (not old, already-printed ones, thankfully).

It's high time Shapeways began differentiating between a 'wall' and a 'detail'. The Stainless Steel page tells us that 3.0 mm is the minimum wall thickness for stainless steel; details can be smaller than that. Most of my models have small details and have printed fine several time. Today, however, two rejections:



If those are 'walls' as opposed to 'details', I'll eat my beret.

What's more, the e-mail included this little gem:

"Increase wall thickness to at least 0.03" / 0.762mm in all areas."

So..... is it 3.0mm, or 0.762mm?

In any case, I have had plenty of models print successfully with similar designs and 'wall' (detail) thicknesses; what makes today's rejections different? Hell, my Forever ring has even thinner 'text' on it, and it prints just fine, and has done so probably over 20 - 25 times now!

In any event, it is absolutely impossible, given the design of the ring, to thicken any of these walls to the magnitude requested - more than tripling the thickness of each one, essentially ruining the design. There's no reason this shouldn't print. If the following can print:

http://shpws.me/mVZV
http://shpws.me/nwgx
http://shpws.me/nFfC
http://shpws.me/nBTX

ALL of which have detail-walls MUCH thinner than both 3.0mm and 0.762mm, then there is NO reason the above model cannot print.

I haven't tried stainless steel yet, but the data sheet says that embossed details require .1mm, or about .04". It looks like you fell in the same trap I did. Because you had models print previously, you designed based upon experience, not strict adherance to the material specifications.

It would be nice if Shapeways had communiated that they were going to be applying the design guidelines more strictly, instead of simply rejecting models.

The problem now is how do we have any confidence that models will print succesfully in the future. That is why I pay for a test print- I want to make sure it will print before offering a model for sale- to make sure I didn't mess it up, and I mess up a lot!

And your particular problem is that all the past ring designs you listed might be rejected in the future at any time if they don't adhere to the materials guidelines.

The issue appears that your details are too tall. For it to be considered a detail, they must be no taller than they are thick. It appears yours are taller then than they are thick.