Announcing "3d Print On Hold" Beta

SW, any word on extending "3D Print on Hold" to the market?

After several weeks of successful printing, my shop is experiencing a string of cancellations over the past few weeks. Extremely unusually, one of the products has been canceled 3 times as of today for the same customer. For that product, which has always passed the autochecks, each design tweak took just a few minutes to make. Surely this iterative process to meet the 3D print engineer's requirement could have been done behind the scenes very quickly without frustrating the customer who I have now asked to re-order the product for the third time.

Interestingly, the recent "Helps us resolve..." messages have come with the same unusual-looking screen captures. Just speculation, but are these rejections coming from the new partner in Ogden, Utah? "Learning curve" issues, perhaps?

Really looking forward to the extension of 3D Print on Hold to the market. It would be a big help.

Yeah, it does get frustrating. I recently had an old pendant design that had been printed NINE times in FIVE different metals rejected because the details were too fine to print.... Not so.

Was taking a look on the news in the forum and found this burning topic still not solved yet.

5 minutes later I found a "Yippee" and "Help us ressolve" mail in my box.

First it was one of the crude rejections where they tend to reject forms which sharpens on an edge, which has nothing to do with thin walls or thin wires.
Second the correction, upload and customer mail was done within 2 hours. Normally it's possible for me in 1 to 2 days where a "Customer: 3d print on hold" would make so much sense.
As said also from some of the others before for me as designer this feature is complete without value. I can easily reorder since I know the process. For a customer that's a break he doesn't understand and maybe doesn't order again.

In principle I also understand and support that SW wants to deliver trusted prints and therefor also generates customer value, but they need to sort out some topics:
- "3d print on hold" for customers as general way to react
- getting rid of wrong rejections
- dealing with design rule changes and rejection of old products. I have products for nearly 10 years in the shop and don't ask me how often I had a bunch of redesign work caused by such changes (=> please beware also my investment as designer in time and test orders)
- bearer and printing multiple items. As also seen in a lot of discussions bearers are one of the major rejection topics. We can get rid of bearers and all rejections involved if there would be a suitable price model for ordering of multiple items of a type or maybe designer.

Woody64

This is fantastic news. This happened a few times and a minor tweak would have made the part printable, and prevented a second order.

Hi all! Thanks so much for coming back around here. We understand that model rejections are a pain point, and doubly so when it comes to your customers ordering models from your shop.

We are working to improve your experience and I'll make sure that your comments reach the right departments. Thank you again, as always, for your support. Your feedback helps!

I'd wager that the purpose of making the feature available to designers first is to ensure all of the programming of the UI and back end are working properly. The last thing SW wants is a slew of designers blasting them for bugs in the new feature and it wouldn't do our customers any good either. At least this way, any issues will be experienced by the designers and not our customers - all the more important for a feature that is meant to give our customers a better experience! I have no issues with a new feature taking the time needed to ensure proper functionality before being rolled out.

However, I'm with Model-Monkey here on the rejections - I've had a lot of odd rejections lately (usually on account of surface detail that the engineer reads as thin walls), and poor quality imagery accompanying them to boot. In the last rejection I received, the image was so tiny I could barely tell which parts of the model were being called out. This lapse in consistency SCREAMS of outsourcing and is very disappointing if the case. I mean, it's frustrating regardless, but if the problem is cause by Shapeways putting crucial QA jobs into the hands of less experienced engineers (or maybe they aren't even actual, qualified engineers?), there will be more hiccups than it's worth to supplement the 'A team' with a lesser experienced 'B team' as Model Monkey perfectly put it.

I love the idea of accompanying 'production notes' as well. Most of my rejections could be avoided if I was able to communicate to the engineer that certain details are suggestive or meant to be surface details, not solid geometry. I understand that Shapeways bears the responsibility of representing products as accurately and honestly as possible but it's clear that some of the engineers are less than capable of recognizing the difference between weak geometry and surface detail - or perhaps it's not their fault at all and they need some direction - hence an option for being able to communicate with them as designers, even if it's only a small note on the product. I wouldn't expect this to guarantee a print of any model just because the designer says 'yeah, no, it's fine' but it would help give the engineers some context to the model and help them make a more informed decision as to whether or not a model rejection is appropriate.

I work mostly in Z scale which is Small and it's not hard to design something with thin walls or support wire size. After ordering 100's of my own model and taking notes on size and knowing what passes and what doesn't. Working with the smallest wall size material like Smooth fine detail plastic. Keeping close to the min. size so price is better Making buildings with thick walls brings the price up so high a person doesn't want to spend that much.
So the rejection are a problem to a point when and Engineer checks a piece and you repair it and place another order just to get it rejected again for another part on that same model! Sure it takes time but QA should be part of the process. I have gotten models with some one else parts that didn't even belong to the model I designed and it was even attached. Then when it come to cleaning model that are to small so they rejected because handling them they might break! I have gotten models that looked great and was well cleaned but then order again and they look worse then the first and they blame it on wall thickness. I think the Engineers are not all trained the same in what they should look for as said about details like a handle on a door or a ridge in a roof gets rejected due to size. good example is the cane in the old mans hand! so small but printed several times and the cane is still there! Not my design just the table!

Yet another pointless rejection here.
The customer who ordered the model might be pissed because there are real photos of the printed stuff

#1- Got several models with almost identical design & 100% printing sucess. Pretty robust.
#2- Updated a couple other very similar existing files -already printed- to mirror the improvements made on models #1
#3- Rejection of #2 by an "engineer".
#4- I responded to rejection and asked to reconsider (I'm an engineer BTW)

I'll keep you guys posted

OK, so they have reconsidered and put the status back "for sale/printable". That could have been avoided in the 1st place, but they sorted it, which is fine by me.
I don't know if the guy who ordered the model will re-order, though. Oh well...

Always the most annoying aspect when this happens.

Actually it's the least annoying to me, since I do this as a side hobby.
What annoys me the most is that someone marks one of my designs as "crappy". I won't post my CV here, but it's a bit like if I tried to give nunchaku lessons to Bruce Lee, if the positions were reversed .

Many professional CAD designers have strong design skills but very few, if any, engineers know about design.

Indeed.
Though, as I wrote above, I won't post my CV here, but I do know stuff

Same here. I'm no engineer but conceptually, I would consider myself on par - especially concerning 3d printing specific tolerances, capabilities, limitations, materials, etc. After all, we're all designing specifically for 3d printing while many engineers evaluating our work are likely given a task list to check off in order to determine printability. I would wager that someone in my shoes with two decades of CAD design under my belt and nearly a decade of hands on 3d printing experience and designing specifically for it is more equipped to do such evaluations than many of the engineers at SW as while some might have a lot of experience, others are probably fresh out of college with no real world experience in engineering as it pertains to 3d printing specifically.

Another designer posted somewhere on the forums, I have unfortunately lost that thread and who posted it, that he received an email from SW giving that designer a chance to adjust a rejected design purchased by a customer before the order was cancelled.

That is exactly what many of us have been asking for. Yay!

Does anyone know if that event was only a test or is this now being implemented? Hoping....

I love for my customers have the push print option. Lot them have seen and know some models will get rejected regardless how much time and work I put in them do to overhangs thin wires etc. They come after the auto checks. But are still ok to model. With the problem. Many my customers fix these bad prints after they receive them. So I say yes to a print anyway buttons for customers.

Got a notice that you quoted my post. I don't work at Shapeways anymore, moved on to doing fun things with games and gaming.

Your best bet would be to ping someone like @avim who runs the product show now.

Good luck!

I've had it happen for a model or so. I am so thankful that Shapeways is working with us on this.

Jean