Hi Michael ...

I'm still having problems with this. I reduced the size and rebuilt the model ... after some fussing with booleans I finally had a solid and it did upload to shapeways after a failure and then increasing the number of polygons for export (by about 20%).

THe cost did came down substantially (but not enough) so I decided to scale it down further to the minimum size practical for its purpose.

I simply scaled it and sent it off ... got a 'manifold error'. So I tried again with increasing the export polygons ... still failed. The whole process seems pretty hit and miss.

I did have some trouble with booleans when I tried to run the cross supports all the way across and then build the pipe like cylinder and do a boolean difference to create an open channel. Finally had to use trim and then rebuild the cylinder back into a solid again.

here are the files ... maybe you can figure out why it fails.

thanks
eric

ps ... never mind ... I found a little closed curve that was still lurking there ... when removed the stl file went through just fine ... as an aside, it is still to expensive to be worth while for a small lampshade though it came down from $1600 to $340 just by making it 24% smaller overall.

Hi Eric,

To reduce the cost of RP, I would suggest:

Hi Ralf-S ... thanks for the suggestion.

I'm not sure how this would reduce the cost ... I thought I understood that the cost applies to weight and material type, primarily.

I guess it also applies to the size of the printer required to do the job.

Am I missing something?



cheers,
eric

Hi Eric,

Our RP service is calculated according to the used "space/box" and the material...
We have the information on the different "Space/box sizes" and
we can optimize our RP parts.
As application, we use (among others):
http://www.solidview.com/Products/SolidViewLite

Hi eric, yeah I see you actually had 2 little extra surfaces in there that were separate objects from the lampshade but overlapping with it, and getting written to the same STL file.

- Michael