online selling/buying stl 3d print files?

[rue_d_etropal]

It might surprise some , but there are actually quite a lot of very satisfied customers for Shapeways products. Most good modellers are capable of finishing off models and it just seems to be a few that expect everything to be supplied perfect. in a way they expect. For some designs finer plastic is more suitable, but for others it is less important and with a bit of time and using the right tools it is possible to smooth off the rougher finish. It is also stronger, and far easier to paint using low cost paints,

That is not what this thread is about, I have tried to show people how to finish off models  but some seem to prefer not to listen to y advice.

Anyway I have set up part of my website for a small number of new designs to be downloaded for free, Apart from the freelance test coahI did, it wili only be buildings, and then only those which in my opinon would cost too much to get Shapeways to print.

Finally, for any business to exist it has to be sustainable,and it can't operate at a loss. Sometimes companies will have special offers to atract new business. A free trial product is a good way to promote a business , so I think offering some of my designs free for downloading makes sense. I enjoy designing and would rather see a design being used rather than being put in my discard box.

[sem34090]

I feel the need to clarify that I have used the cheap Shapeways material and achieved some almost-acceptable results after an awful lot of priming and sanding, which wasn't really all that enjoyable. As I prefer to actually enjoy my modelling, I would rather not have to do this to get an almost-acceptable model.

 

I agree that most good modellers can probably achieve something with the material, though what constitutes a 'good' modeller is incredibly subjective, but most wouldn't get much pleasure out of what feels like endless repeated sanding and priming. It has been a very long time since I did this however, so perhaps your advice differs from this method.

 

I should also clarify that I don't expect everything to be perfect or done for me - A resin print will generally require an amount of work with a blade to remove the supports (easily done before full curing)- but prefer to have a reasonably smooth surface to begin with, as provided by resin prints, resin castings, whitemetal castings, card (in its various forms), brass, laser-cut wood (I'm referring to building kits here) etc. In fact the cheap nylon used by Shapeways and I.materialise has the worst initial finish of any kit material I've yet used.

 

If you consider something to be too expensive to be printed by shapeways then it must be truly expensive as some of the prices for 4mm/ft stuff are already extortionate for the quality of product offered.

 

Anyhow, for our combined sanity and to preserve the topic here by not continuing to deviate from it I'll leave you alone and agree to disagree regarding materials, shapeways and file availability.

[tebee]

Printing at Shapeways and printing at home are two different things with two different sets of costs.

 

Nearest analogy i can make is going out to eat a meal at a restaurant and cooking the same meal at home. You know the former will be more expensive but the results should be better because they have more experience doing it and have better equipment to work with, although this is not always the case in both scenarios!

 

Doing it at home will take more of your time and skills and you may have to make capital expenditure if you don't have the right equipment - having said that domestic machinery is much cheaper than the commercial equivalent that you need if you are using it day in day out.

 

However to continue my analogy whille some home cooks will be able to produce restaurant standard meals at home  others will struggle to produce anything edible, even if given the recipe and full instructions. 

 

But for the most part there is the middle ground. The home cook can produce something fine at considerably less cost.  Equally most people with the skills and time can produce home prints as good or better than the commercial services, but there is still a place for those services to cater for those who don't want to cook/print themselves or may not be able to do so for any on of a thousand reasons.

[55020]

Apologies if this is seen as thread drift, but I use this website if searching for STLs.  Under the "search options" button you can select free.  Search results are a bit hit and miss as it is dependant on the author or website containing the correct search information.

https://www.yeggi.com/
 

Another option is  https://www.stlfinder.com/

 

If anyone is looking for a website to host their designs, there are of course lots of options.  I have no idea what their fee structure is if you charge for a download, but I would have thought a little bit of digging would unearth the answer.  My favourites are:

https://cults3d.com/

https://free3d.com/

https://grabcad.com/

https://pinshape.com/

https://www.myminifactory.com/

and of course the huge https://www.thingiverse.com

 

 

Steve

[justin1985]

17 minutes ago, tebee said:

However to continue my analogy whille some home cooks will be able to produce restaurant standard meals at home  others will struggle to produce anything edible, even if given the recipe and full instructions. 

 

But for the most part there is the middle ground. The home cook can produce something fine at considerably less cost.  Equally most people with the skills and time can produce home prints as good or better than the commercial services, but there is still a place for those services to cater for those who don't want to cook/print themselves or may not be able to do so for any on of a thousand reasons.

 

To perhaps cheekily extend your analogy a step further, this is exactly why a lot of top restaurants publish recipe books of their signature dishes.

 

The recipe book allows the dedicated home cook to emulate the restaurant dish, but perhaps most who buy it will just end up using it as a coffee table book. At the end of the day, selling a recipe book is unlikely to dent the number of people visiting the restaurant, and in fact is more likely to act as extra publicity.

[Enterprisingwestern]

8 hours ago, rue_d_etropal said:

It might surprise some , but there are actually quite a lot of very satisfied customers for Shapeways products. Most good modellers are capable of finishing off models and it just seems to be a few that expect everything to be supplied perfect. in a way they expect. For some designs finer plastic is more suitable, but for others it is less important and with a bit of time and using the right tools it is possible to smooth off the rougher finish. It is also stronger, and far easier to paint using low cost paints,

 

I'm sorry but that's a spurious statement, Airfix were making kits kits 50 or more years ago that are at least ten times better surface finish than Shapeways and to say that "good modellers are capable of finishing off models" would infer that we all should still be building Jamieson and Sayer Chaplin kits.

Times and technology move on and I'm afraid that Shapeways, for me and many others, is too far behind the times and not of good enough quality.

I repeat, I don't mind paying a good price for a decent quality product, but as it stands Shapeways just doesn't cut the mustard.

 

Mike.

 

Edited May 22, 2020 by Enterprisingwestern

[Buhar]

Just chucking this in.  As a consumer and if I had access to a resin printer, I would probably be content to pay around £20 for an STL of a tank engine if I was confident the designer knew what they were doing. 

Alan 

[chris p bacon]

1 hour ago, Buhar said:

Just chucking this in.  As a consumer and if I had access to a resin printer, I would probably be content to pay around £20 for an STL of a tank engine if I was confident the designer knew what they were doing. 

Alan 

 

Designing/drawing a tank loco is the easy part, making it suitable to fit an existing chassis, or giving some details of how it should be motorised is nearly always non existent, this part of designing is the difficult part and what is always avoided.

 Shapeways is rammed full of items which have never been test printed to see if they actually work. I had on my bench recently some 3D locomotives that went through 3 test prints before getting to a point where we were able to put wheels and motor underneath them, the difference in the design each time was minimal, but between the first and last print was the difference between a resin ornament and a working loco.

 

I would only purchase an stl if it was shown that it would actually print, so many don't.

[Tricky-CRS]

I have looked at items on Shapeways amongst others many times and come to the conclusion to save my money up and eventually buy my own resin printer. As a result I am currently learning Fusion 360, with growing confidence. I am currently drawing a 1938 bedford 3 ton short tipper and will move through the varients in the 1938 brochure I bought on ebay. I have also drawn so vehicle backs to fit on the N Gauge R Parker Morris Commercial and a stack of 1930s British flimsey fuel cans. I could buy some of these on internet but would cost alot and not be in the best material. I would be interested in buying stls in certain curcumstances as it would save me drawing what has already been drawn. But as I may want to sell models again (way in future) I am reluctant to do so and feel I am best learning the sklls myself, if i did I would contact designer to discuss first.

[oorail]

We've been experimenting with this for just over two years, so I thought you might be interested in what we've learnt, you can see the end result at:

 

https://trackside3d.co.uk/

 

We have just over 20 FDM printers and a couple of MSLA printers. The most important thing is a 100% reproducible print, with the assumption the customer's printer is leveled and calibrated correctly. The baseline we went with was a working XYZ calibration cube and the calibration cat. If your printer will print those, all of our models should print on your printer. The second most important thing is to design the model for the 3D printer technology (Eg. FDM or MSLA). When you do this, you end up with some really good results, like this 40' container:

 

https://trackside3d.co.uk/products/t3d-030-000-40-container

 

The third thing we've found that was really important was the licensing and pricing. We're on the third iteration of our license, which is based on software licensing. When someone buys one of the 3D models, they aren't buying the model but buying a license to use the model. Doing it this way, we provide free updates to the model and the person can re-download the model if they need to. We allow them to make unlimited prints for their own personal use. This was based off the approach Scalescenes takes, and its proven very effective.

 

We found that people printing models would often get confused or have problems because they were tweaking too many settings at once. So what we did was setup baseline profiles (small, medium and large objects), and slight modifications for materials. You can see this in the specifications and print settings tabs on the website.

 

We're currently working on a secure solution to allow users to view 3D objects (like Thingiverse) and working on videos / layout photos of the current products.

 

Right now I've got probably 100 additional designs that I need to clean up, export, package and create product entries for, in addition to updating whats on the site. Its a lot of effort, but should be good when its done.

 

We've spent quite a bit of time perfecting 3D printable (with FDM) locos and rolling stock, and those are next. However, at this point, its going to be a matter of promoting 3D printing more via YouTube, and working on several new products each week.

 

The reason we have 20+ FDM printers is basically for testing and design, we don't mass-produce end products, only ship the designs. We have a few printers dedicated to special materials, such as transparent PETG and PolySmooth, textured PLA, Wood-Hybrid PLA, Iron composite PLA, couple of different brands of PETG, HTPLA (high temp PLA), various different PLA brands and some special materials like TPU etc. The brands / models of printers we have are:

 

• JG Aurora z603s
• JG Aurora A5 / A5S 
• JG Auora A1 / A1X
• Creality Ender 3
• Creality Ender 3 Pro
• Creality Ender 5
• Creality CR-10 S5
• ANET A8
• M3Ds
• AnyCubic Photons

 

The bulk of our print-farm is Ender 5, Ender 3, CR-10s and JG Aurora A5. 

 

We do all the 3D modeling work in Blender, use Cura to slice and custom software to manage the print queues. At full capacity, we can churn out around 20-40 projects a week, depending on whats going on. We try to keep the printers going 24x7, as it leads to less problems!

 

That sort of leads into my last point. We've found that people tend to want a steady stream of designs. We tested this out over the past 2+ years by offering a monthly subscription service that costs about $20/month, but you get a steady stream of designs, while we've limited the release of designs on the main ecommerce store. The subscription service is by far, the most popular thing that we offer.

 

An interesting thing too about the models, we design everything for OO scale, mainly because thats what I model, and the whole project is more about getting people interested in 3D printing, however we do get a lot of people modeling O gauge and sometimes HO and N, who purchase models and then use the slicer to scale up/down.

 

Hope that helps... 

 

[njee20]

12 hours ago, rue_d_etropal said:

It might surprise some , but there are actually quite a lot of very satisfied customers for Shapeways products. Most good modellers are capable of finishing off models and it just seems to be a few that expect everything to be supplied perfect. in a way they expect. For some designs finer plastic is more suitable, but for others it is less important and with a bit of time and using the right tools it is possible to smooth off the rougher finish. It is also stronger, and far easier to paint using low cost paints,

 

I get that you sell through Shapeways, so perhaps consider the need to defend it, but I don't think anyone is saying that. FUD (or whatever it's called now) is vastly more expensive than printing resin; it's brittle, the surface finish is acceptable, but not great. WSF has a terrible finish "out of the box", and isn't fundamentally better in strength or anything. Shapeways (to me) has literally nothing going for it other than availability of models. For many that alone is sufficient, but for many it's not. Yes ok you don't have to remove supports or whatever, but you spend 10 times longer sanding, priming, cleaning etc.

 

To resurrect the now hideously tortured restaurant analogy, Shapeways are providing you the gormet meal, but the pasta sauce comes in a dish on the side, and your salad includes a lot of things you don't want. The constituent parts are great, but you still need to spend a lot of time to get it exactly right. If you use the recipe book at home you don't need to do these steps. It's not that people want perfection or they're lazy or anything you're insinuating, it's that a lot of people can produce a superior (to them) result at home.

I'd definitely buy STLs for some things for the right price (I like the idea of £20 for an item of rolling stock), but I'm still not sure I'd sell them (and certainly wouldn't for £20!).

[sem34090]

3 hours ago, chris p bacon said:

 

Designing/drawing a tank loco is the easy part, making it suitable to fit an existing chassis, or giving some details of how it should be motorised is nearly always non existent, this part of designing is the difficult part and what is always avoided.

 Shapeways is rammed full of items which have never been test printed to see if they actually work. I had on my bench recently some 3D locomotives that went through 3 test prints before getting to a point where we were able to put wheels and motor underneath them, the difference in the design each time was minimal, but between the first and last print was the difference between a resin ornament and a working loco.

 

I would only purchase an stl if it was shown that it would actually print, so many don't.

This is my only other concern with some of Simon's output, and probably not an insurmountable one.

 

When drawing up a loco, I usually also draw a model of the RTR chassis it's going to sit on first, or it it's not using an RTR chassis my mates at CDC Design will help me draw up a chassis block for it.

[monkeysarefun]

On 22/05/2020 at 09:01, justin1985 said:

But for those who prefer to roll their own, a site like Cults3D (it was only the first Google hit, there may be better ones out there!) seem to be the ideal solution, surely?

 

yeggi.com is intended to be a  kind of portal for many of these sites, both free and commercial. Its basically  a search engine that'll search through all sites rather than you having to do it. Its pretty good and you can specify say free prints only, or specific file formats.

 

Edit: Scrolled up and  noticed someone has beat me to this already - as you were!

Edited May 22, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[Pete the Elaner]

15 hours ago, Buhar said:

Just chucking this in.  As a consumer and if I had access to a resin printer, I would probably be content to pay around £20 for an STL of a tank engine if I was confident the designer knew what they were doing. 

Alan 

 

That's not the way it usually works.

In my case (& I'm sure most others too), 3d printing was a way to produce what I simply couldn't buy. For me it was window frames to the size my (prototype replica) building needed. I tried with plastruct but was unhappy with the result.

After a few weeks of more error than trial & some help from friends, I have produced exactly what I bought it for.

Now I have the 3d printer & am more comfortable with the design software, it has become another option for building something I can't buy.

[sem34090]

7 minutes ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

That's not the way it usually works.

In my case (& I'm sure most others too), 3d printing was a way to produce what I simply couldn't buy. For me it was window frames to the size my (prototype replica) building needed. I tried with plastruct but was unhappy with the result.

After a few weeks of more error than trial & some help from friends, I have produced exactly what I bought it for.

Now I have the 3d printer & am more comfortable with the design software, it has become another option for building something I can't buy.

But... it is producing something that one can't buy, what @Buhar says? He is suggesting purchasing a file for a locomotive that might very well be unavailable to purchase as a physical model?

 

Apologies to return to my repetitive twaddle, but the same would apply if the locomotive was also offered on Shapeways; One can't buy the models offered on Shapeways in a decent material, at a decent quality for a decent price. I don't possess the scratch-building skills to produce a Metropolitan Railway H Class 4-4-4T, which I would dearly love a model of, and to the best of my knowledge the only currently available model is Simon's on Shapeways so as far as I'm concerned it might as well not be available.

 

So surely if the file were offered for sale, and were I to print it, would I not have used the printer to produce something that I can't buy - The body of a Metropolitan Railway H Class 4-4-4T with an acceptable surface finish at an acceptable price to serve as the basis for a model of that locomotive class.

[Nick Holliday]

5 hours ago, sem34090 said:

Apologies to return to my repetitive twaddle, but the same would apply if the locomotive was also offered on Shapeways; One can't buy the models offered on Shapeways in a decent material, at a decent quality for a decent price. I don't possess the scratch-building skills to produce a Metropolitan Railway H Class 4-4-4T, which I would dearly love a model of, and to the best of my knowledge the only currently available model is Simon's on Shapeways so as far as I'm concerned it might as well not be available.

 

So surely if the file were offered for sale, and were I to print it, would I not have used the printer to produce something that I can't buy - The body of a Metropolitan Railway H Class 4-4-4T with an acceptable surface finish at an acceptable price to serve as the basis for a model of that locomotive class.

No need to build from scratch, Worsley Works and a team from RMweb have produced etchings and boiler fittings

http://www.worsleyworks.co.uk/Image-Pages/Image_4mm_MetroH.htm

[sem34090]

9 hours ago, Nick Holliday said:

No need to build from scratch, Worsley Works and a team from RMweb have produced etchings and boiler fittings

http://www.worsleyworks.co.uk/Image-Pages/Image_4mm_MetroH.htm

I shall have to consider that, thanks Nick.

 

For the moment I think sticking with a print is a good idea, as having only very limited experience with brass £80 is a bit steep for me currently. At least the basic surface finish would be miles better than Shapeways' though!

 

[Andy Reichert]

On 22/05/2020 at 02:29, chris p bacon said:

 

Designing/drawing a tank loco is the easy part, making it suitable to fit an existing chassis, or giving some details of how it should be motorised is nearly always non existent, this part of designing is the difficult part and what is always avoided.

 Shapeways is rammed full of items which have never been test printed to see if they actually work. I had on my bench recently some 3D locomotives that went through 3 test prints before getting to a point where we were able to put wheels and motor underneath them, the difference in the design each time was minimal, but between the first and last print was the difference between a resin ornament and a working loco.

 

I would only purchase an stl if it was shown that it would actually print, so many don't.

 

I have noticed that a motorized chassis, especially if running to the proverbial "swiss watch" standard, is always the missing part of 3D printed body suppliers offerings.

 

To me that's the difficult part. Anyone can knock up a body because it's just static material. Only the exterior appearance matters.  But gears, shafts, wheels, bearings, motors all have to be precision parts made by someone who really knows what they are doing and has the machine tools, the money and the capability to get all those produced, before there is a possibility of a complete working model being available.

 

When I'm planning tp make a model, the chassis is the first part I design and work on, not the last.

 

Andy

[sem34090]

My compromise on that is that I usually try and design stuff for a Ready-to-Run chassis. Not the best, I know, but at least it means the model should run.

[Buhar]

4 hours ago, Andy Reichert said:

But gears, shafts, wheels, bearings, motors all have to be precision parts made by someone who really knows what they are doing and has the machine tools, the money and the capability to get all those produced, before there is a possibility of a complete working model being available.

 

When I'm planning tp make a model, the chassis is the first part I design and work on, not the last.

 

Andy

Hi Andy,

 

I rely on the expertise, tools and capabilty of Alan Gibson, Markits, High Level, Hornby, Bachmann and the unknown motor designers in China.  All I do is select those that seem suitable and put them together.  However, quite often you will have a body first and have to jiggle things to fit; old DJH to avoid using their awful chunky brass strip chassis; replacing an old split frame job, acquiring a good body only on eBay; whatever.  What you say about getting the under-gubbins right first is a good principle, but sometimes not an option,

 

In respect of a 3D printed body (I'm aware that chassis are also available for some models), I wouldn't expect it to plonk directly on any suitable conventional chassis/motor arrangement and have fixing points all lined up , but I would expect that clearances are sensible and that there is space for a motor and some weight.

 

Alan

[Andy Reichert]

57 minutes ago, Buhar said:

Hi Andy,

 

I rely on the expertise, tools and capabilty of Alan Gibson, Markits, High Level, Hornby, Bachmann and the unknown motor designers in China.  All I do is select those that seem suitable and put them together.  However, quite often you will have a body first and have to jiggle things to fit; old DJH to avoid using their awful chunky brass strip chassis; replacing an old split frame job, acquiring a good body only on eBay; whatever.  What you say about getting the under-gubbins right first is a good principle, but sometimes not an option,

 

In respect of a 3D printed body (I'm aware that chassis are also available for some models), I wouldn't expect it to plonk directly on any suitable conventional chassis/motor arrangement and have fixing points all lined up , but I would expect that clearances are sensible and that there is space for a motor and some weight.

 

Alan

 

I normally only design stuff so that it can be made in unlimited quantities, without being dependent on other manufacturers retail parts.

 

Andy

[njee20]

You’re in a minority. Do you make your own  couplers too? What about wheels?

[sem34090]

Wire? Motors?

[Andy Reichert]

4 hours ago, njee20 said:

You’re in a minority. Do you make your own  couplers too? What about wheels?

 

I don't understand why being in a minority would be a problem?  I'm a retired engineer, so of course I make my own stuff where I can.

 

These are some of my own wheels

 

 

These are my own experimental couplings between a couple of Hornby Gresleys.

 

Generally I buy in already standard items like rail and wire.  For motors I'm checking out a Chinese supplier that I can upgrade to my specification.

 

I run the SIG supply stores for the Proto:87 SIG as my hobby. Hope this helps.

 

Andy

 

 

 

 

 

 

[njee20]

Of course it’s not a problem. But there is an unpleasant tone to your post that people who build bodyshells for manufactured chassis are inferior or wrong. 

The reality is that the overwhelming majority of us who design stuff rely on some additional parts from manufactures because we either don’t want to produce all of those parts, or won’t do it as well for the time/effort/cost involved. Nothing wrong with that.