So... Is It "first To Try" Or Not?

This is part of what has been annoying me lately about the printability status of certain models and the arbitrary nature of the QA technicians. I literally received the following two messages just hours apart.

7 hours ago:

10 minutes ago:

These are literally the same model (product C6Z565SMF)!

Seriously, Shapeways. Can we please get some quality control on the quality control?

It's not exactly a matter of quality control if an item breaks, and more often than not such messages are indicative that the item broke during cleaning or packing. That's why WSF has the 1.0mm wire thickness rule, but for some items, you need significantly more thickness to keep it from breaking. I really wish that the post-printing process included photographs of anything that breaks.

I've learned over the years that I must protect items which stick out a good bit. Your model has ?gun barrels? that protrude significantly. I have had a number of such items that I had to wrap with a cage to keep them from breaking during cleaning/packing/shipping.

Why are you splitting up the parts for printing? We have them connected by sprues for a reason, not the least of which is the parts-per-model penalty on WSF, but also because we don't want those parts to get lost. Am I to understand that Shapeways is altering our models before they are printed?

Oddly enough, the gun barrels have never been a problem. 80% of the time a model fails, it seems to be due to Shapeways' bizarre allergy to sprues.

I got a very prompt response from the Service folks after this model was cancelled:

At this point, though, I don't know how I would redesign the model since it 1) already meets all published design guidelines, and 2) passed all the 3D tools checks. How am I to know what else needs to be done to "fix" the model if it already meets all your requirements?

Is this even really an issue with the model, or with the technicians handling it?

Will do. But since this is the same model that led to me launching this thread, I think it might be helpful to others to share whatever information Lefteri and I are able to glean from this experience.

Well, Lefteri tried his best to be helpful, but the bottom line is that, even though this product (especially its sprues) meets all the published guidelines and passed all the automated checks, it still might not be printable if it breaks in the hands of the technicians. He suggested I add fillets to where the sprues meet the model, but the problem there is that the fillets will make it more difficult for the customer to remove the sprues and could possibly lead to breaking the model while doing so.

That leaves me with the following conclusions:

-- I did everything correctly and strictly by the book.
-- I utilized all the tools Shapeways makes available to ensure success.
-- But it's my fault this design isn't working.

So, somehow I have to meet an unknown standard that no one can enunciate until it fails, at which time we'll know I failed to meet the standard. Can you begin to see my frustration? I appreciate that this is still an emerging technology, and that neither you or Lefteri were the techs who witnessed firsthand what went wrong with the models, but there has to be a better answer than this.