W would like to announce a few updates to the design rules for White Strong & Flexible Polishing. The more we work with these materials, the more we learn about what is possible and what isn’t. Over the past few months, we have learned some important things to take into account when designing for this material process. Please take the time and look this over, it will save everybody time and disappointment in receiving their models broken or out of shape!
White Strong & Flexible Polished bounding box: we are asking for minimum of 10x10x2mm per part (not per STL)
If your STL has multiple parts, the STL may still get rejected if any particular part in the STL is smaller than the above bounding box
Why? This is because we are finding that pieces smaller are falling through the grates in our polishing machine, or getting stuck or lost among the media used to polish. We hope this won’t be too much of an inconvenience. Most pieces of this size will lose details in the polishing process.
Suggestions? We recommend looking at White Detail, or Frosted Detail/Frosted Ultra Detail instead for a smooth finish to smaller pieces.
White Strong & Flexible Polished wires supporting larger items (eg sprues): When you have a thin wire supporting a larger item, try making the wire at least 1.5-2mm thick for White Strong & Flexible Polished
When designing for WSFP, try to avoid support larger masses with small wires. This is the helicopter problem, where the propellers are supported by a tiny wire that connects to the body of the helicopter.
Why? When put in the polishing machine, it is very easy for these types of structures to snap.
Suggestions? We recommend making the base supporting wire thicker. Right now, it looks like things around 1.5-2 mm would be strong, but we will be making some tests so to get a better understanding of what the ratio should be.
Thanks for your input and understanding as we refine these processes to ensure we can produce your designs reliably, at the highest quality detail.