Serious Problems With “tan” Detail Plastic.

The problem is Shapeways invested in this wax breakaway support technology and those printers dont seem to offer the resolution miniature and model designers need. The layer lines are horrible and the brittleness combined with warping results in shattered models.

Other print services (3d craft cloud Xometry etc...) the printers use industrial version of the Elegoo, Anycubic etc printers and just deal with the cleaning curing and cleanup. All While having a cheaper price per print. The only thing keep us designers from using them is they dont offer an established marketplace. So as @hendi mentioned he is doing his own prints. However, if you don't have a high traffic store or marketplace you are out of luck.

Indeed the only thing in SW's favour is the "Shop" system that lets anybody go into business while SW takes care of the payments, printing, and shipping. Sadly the search interface is rubbish so customers can't find what they want, and the print quality is falling behind what can be done by home printing enthusiasts. Somebody in SW management needs to get their butt kicked until they see the light and get the same kinds of printers everyone else is using for successful detailed printing...

there are companies out there, such as Protolabs etc. but they are all well established now and I don't see how Shapeways can hope to compete with them.
The one thing that is missing from the market is a good hobbyist resource, such as Shapeways were in the beginning.
Lots of us have home printers now, but there are still thousands of people out there who will never own such a device (for many reasons) and they will always be looking for s good supplier. However, with Shapeways current material set and pricing structure, there is very little chance they will manage to take over that market.

I’m a customer and having a lot of problems with these new material prints.

in fact, the designer from who I bought give up using the tan material due the defects in the details, holes, etc, so he changed all his prints to Clear Ultra Fine Detail Plastic, but even so about the quality it’s very fairway from the previews materials.

On Clear Ultra Fine Detail Plastic, the material arrive already bent, and it’s super easy to break.

One single exemple attached. A part that it should have straight vains, the vains are completely bent.

Sadly, if Shapeways continues with this lack of quality, I’ll be forced to stop my buys. It’s very frustrating spend some amount of money and the prints comes badly printed.

Ok new examples from a customer. The customer purchased some of our 40k shields and the quality was horrible. I have attached the images he provided. To me the quality of the tan fine detail looks like someone carved balsa wood with a bad knife.

To Shapeways (@MitchellJetten). this customer has stated they will not buy from you again and will find someone to print my stls. Thats money you are loosing.

You mean they weren't meant to represent shields carved from old oak timbers?

I must admit I'm thinking about withdrawing my "shop" from public view until SW comes up with a better-quality material, just to save potential customers from the disappointment of Tan.

At this point I am thinking of no longer offering the TAN on any of my designs. It is crazy, this material is just horrible.

Personally I am also seriously considering dropping the material altogether, be either Tan or Clear Ultra. Aside from some very specific customers who want their products in said material (mostly because for lighting kits I guess), I see no longer much reason to continue with it.
I mostly make ship model kits and I've been using Smooth Detail for small, detailed parts like secondary and AA guns and fittings in 1/600 and 1/700 scales, but with the sudden mass rejection and unnotified thickness changes for the material, I may just drop it altogether as there's not much difference with Versatile Plastic anyways. Smooth Versatile has an infinitely better finish, and if I have to design a barrel that's 1 mm thick otherwise it would not print, instead of what I could do before with Smooth Detail, I may as well have it print in Versatile than Tan.

I understand Shapeways' problem with the discontinuation of their previous printers and materials offering the Smooth Detail option, but to me it seems everybody agrees that the new choice backfired spectacularly. Notwithstanding the massive misinformation hiccup to shop owners and customers alike about the spec changes, but this is not the place for that particular rant. The point now is, that investment has been made and is probably here to stay. Now the problem is the material itself as is far from being equal to the previous choice.
Obviously we cannot expect Shapeways to ditch their investment in new printers just because the material is not up to expectations, nor even the one of old (although that should be reason enough). Instead, I suggest they focus on finding a material that's compatible with the machines they are now running but can get closer to the original Smooth Detail specifications, but even if that would not be possible, then at least fix the material finish issues. Because what I've seen posted so far in this thread is most definitely not an acceptable compromise for a commercial solution, even if it's cheaper than the older one.

The alternative is what some people (myself included) have already stated, ditching the material altogether as not competitive nor satisfactory enough for customers. Some others have found themselves confronted with the horrible choice between reworking most of their models (speaking mainly of miniature shop owners) or just restart from scratch, if the blow to morale does not make them leave altogether for a different market. And they would probably feel justified in doing so.
I don't know how that would hit economically speaking, but with the issues at hand I can hardly see how the investment in this new Tan and Clear Ultra can even pay for itself in the long run, if a portion of shop owners is willing to ditch the material altogether instead of going through the hassle of multiple back and forth with angry customers asking for refunds and multiple products being rejected (sometimes more than once, ask me how I know) to rework to new specs. It would be easier sometimes to just build a new one on par with current specs.

As I said, since you Shapeways asked for suggestion and feedback, then probably looking for a more refined material to use with the same printers would be a more feasible solution. You would not even have to replace Tan and Clear Ultra, just add another option that could either print finer details, or have a really good, nice and shiny smooth finish, as this should have had from the beginning. Ideally both, but this is a world of compromises.
I understand this is also not an easy solution, but you asked us for feedback and these are my 2 cents on the matter. Because the current state of affairs is far from ideal and worsening the longer it is dragged on.

CH

In an ideal world SW would absorb the loss by firing some senior execs that approved this garbage, but we all know that isn't how it works at the top...

It is time for SW to dump the new printers and get the same SLA ones everyone else is now using! Sure, adding supports is a bit of an art, but that can be overcome.

Totally agree, but as said we live in a world of compromises.
I'm only sorry for the poor people who have to do PR like our Mitchell because they get sh*t thrown at them through no fault of their own, just the higher ups doing higher ups things and ignoring the customers' and shop owners' base, because they have to show every choice they make is a success and a profit in the shareholders' pockets. Because nowadays that's just how everything works.

I'd be interested to know how many of those thousands of designs for the MJP printers actually sell, and thus gauge exactly how big a problem it would cause. (I'm willing to be less than 20% actually sell...) If you switched off MJP today and told the designers to rework their products for SLA that would sort the wheat from the chaff - currently-active designers would modify their products and the rest of the "ghost" accounts would simply disappear. My big concern is that at the moment we simply don't have a suitable material for detailed minis - the Tan and Clear are not up to the job. So unless SW wants to completely kill off the detailed end of the market they need to take some drastic action sharpish. It's a massive disservice ( read "insult") to your customers to continue shipping them the Tan garbage in return for their money. Change is upsetting, and can be hard work, but if it is needed it has to happen...

Sorry for the delay writing back. I had to do some digging in my record. The order is from

Wed, Oct 4, 2023, 8:56 PM

and the info in my sales is
Oct 11 '23 Sable Knights Heavy Storm Shields (LEFT) x10 Tan Fine Detail Plastic MZ7T5NZEN 1 $4.48

I have shared the link to contact you, but he said he was told it was too late. Ordered in October 23. and just getting around to looking at the prints this month and reaching out to get stls to print on his on either with a printer at home or using another service.

The problem is some tabletop minists will come up with a concept order all the parts. and it can take them months to get around to actually working on the project. I personally have items in my. "Pile of Shame" that are years old =)

Now the customer I am not going to put there name here but @MitchellJetten if you want I can discuss with you via my contact email.

Mitchell I let him know.

.... at the end after years of struggling still no suitable material available for miniatures, with
- acceptable price
- surface
- keeping the designs invests without major design rule changes
- color grey or black

also it seems that for SW there's no resin option in sight?

(I got some customer pictures for fresh designed tan objects, which were also published on insta and the color and items don't seem to attract the comunity, feedback is low ....)