Vote me in for highly disgruntled designer.
Have lost probably £60-100 on Shapeways cancellations that were NOT re-ordered after the fix.
This has also made me furiously save up for a 3DP to do some of the work myself...that will mean less money for Shapeways if I do that and more for me if it works out.
And yes, it makes you as the designer look silly. Highly infuriating when the model has printed several times before or a sprue fails and you have to redesign 50 or more items REPEATEDLY for having the same or similar geometry.
I've whinged about this so many times and I will continue to do so as the more of us rise up on it the more chance something will be done.
To Shapeways - so far many GOOD suggestions have been made in this thread already, please consider them.
EDIT:
What Robert said:
"My suggestions:
1) allow designer to add some remarks to models that are printed for the first time, so he/she can 'pre-empt' rejections
2) or whenever you want to reject a model, have a 'freeze' period of 1-2 working days first, in which you do nothing,
and wait for the designer to reply first (so no canceling of orders, refunds etc.); lets talk first!
"
regarding 1), you can think of e.g. 'this model is a variant of model with SPIN xxx, printed successfully many times, changes in the area of xxx only"
This I too have suggested to Lefteri before.
If we as designers could put notes in the products readable only to print engineers then I'm sure it would help.
Sometimes a model has printed several times then it fails, or you break it in cleaning and blame us reducing the first to try status or cancelling an order (yes - I know this is true sometimes! Not good) so we redesign the product correcting the apparent error...then you reject it again for a completely different area that wasn't even changed!!! Yes indeed.
Different people giving checks gives different opinions and that means moving goal posts, especially as sometimes geometry that is bigger than minimum quoted is still rejected in areas. I admit I can't yet see an easy work around for this, maybe have several engineers detailed to several designers? Probably too hard to organise, that I understand.
Also some rejections are 100% pointless it seems too.
I had an order of some '12 gas bottles' rejected becasue my escape holes were too thin. I did make them but there would be trapped powder inside so the model was rejected. In reality the modeller would smooth it off and paint them not giving a damn on the internal dimensions of a bottle roughly 1cm x 6mm's.
So upon redesigning it and telling the customer....no re-order!
Normal.