purchased two of these in frosted ultra detail and they are amazing... very nice design. impressed with the rotating gears, seems to be no limit to 3d printing.

Love your design, great idea

I wish it could work in metal, too, but due to limitations with both Shapeways' printing process and the design, that's not possible. The clearances between the gears are too tight to work in any material but Frosted Detail/Ultra Detail, and if we expanded them it would make the whole mechanism very loose and clumsy. Also, Shapeways' restrictions concerning Stainless Steel prohibit the design in two ways: one, it will be rejected for being too fragile in some areas such as the gears, and two, they do not allow moving parts in metal. The metal printers' resolutions are too coarse to allow printing of the parts separately and assembly by hand, the teeth just couldn't be guaranteed to mesh. I'm sorry we can't provide it in metal, but there is simply no way to do it currently.