Hello Want to know if shapeways can print a sliding ring like in the photo in metal. What clearances should I keep. It is 0.5mm right now
Silver and a few other materials allow interlocking designs. No for Gold. The clearance for Silver has to be 1.0mm You can see the required clearances on each of the respective material pages.
An escape hole is generally a hole that allows our team to remove any support material from the interior of a hollow form. Clearance is a more general term, applied to any two surfaces that are close together but not touching. As rule of thumb, the more surface area and the more enclosed a form, allow for more space.
Thanks Any future updates to have clearance upto 0.5mm in silver etc Any similar parts your team has done before. Could you direct me to an example. Couldn't find any on the website Thanks again.
These metals are produced by conventional lost wax casting, just using a 3d printed master. Even the current 1mm clearance limit looks quite ambitious to me given your ring design - need to get mold material in and out of that gap somehow. Also as I understand the production process, these interlocking parts are actually joined by temporary sprues that they add for casting and clip out before polishing. So I wonder if your ring design is actually printable even with 1mm gaps... (Had a design consisting of two closely interwoven networks rejected recently - "impossible to add sprues, split it in two") The recent blog entry made when "interlocking metal" went from a pilot project to a generally available material option has some comparatively simple examples, basically chain-like linkages: https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/26785-link-up-with-interlocking-metals.html
I don't think this is printable as single piece in any metal, except maybe aluminum which requires clearance of 0.6mm. Even if printable, the interior surfaces will be rough the inner ring won't be able to spin smoothly. Something like this I would do in 3 pieces, inner tube with a flange on one end, outer tube will be the middle ring that moves freely, and end flange to hold the middle ring after assembly. mirror polish everything, then shrink fit the end flange.