RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

I know who you mean and I have considered some of his work. There are items for sale on Shapeways that are unique. However, I question the wisdom of trying to sell an item that is readily available elsewhere at reasonable quality and then price it some 35 times more expensive.

Max-U52 wrote:I never understood why anyone would use shapeways to begin with. They're a bunch of parasites that charge about 10 times as much as what the products are worth and for some reason people keep buying from them. I just don't understand it.

Some materials, like SLS printed flexible plastic or metal are not available on home machines. Before I buy 3D printer I ordered lots of stuff there, but mostly my own projects. "Flexible plastic" is in my opinion much better for RC tank use. Will not brake like standard SLA print. Also industrial laser printers which they use back then have amazing detail in comparison with home resin printers. Now of course it's changing.

I don't buy things on Shapeways where there is another option somewhere else. Sometimes they are the only option. I do however like some of their metal 3D printed chassis braces for Tamiya tanks. They are nice items even though they are expensive. The KV-1 brace works awesome. The Sherman brace had to be shimmed to work well, but it did fix some idler alignment issues. I had to modify the stock speaker enclosure slightly to get it to fit though.

silversurfer1947 wrote:I have limited experience of Shapeways but came across this whilst looking for something totally different. I have to ask what they can be thinking. Do they seriously expect to sell any of these? Or have I misinterpreted something! https://www.shapeways.com/product/2YMEW ... arketplace

The same guy quoted me $300 for a 1/4 scale MG34, which would have amounted to nearly £300 by the time Vat duty and postage had been added. He got quite upset when I politely declined.

From what I understand about Shapeways, they somewhat set the prices and only give some of the profit back to the designer.

I'm not positive, but I believe the designer gets 20% for each piece sold, and that's assuming that shapeways tells the designer how many pieces they actually sold. Somehow I don't think they do, I think they sell as many parts as they can for as much money as they can get and pay out as little money as they can to the people that designed it.

Max-U52 wrote:I'm not positive, but I believe the designer gets 20% for each piece sold, and that's assuming that shapeways tells the designer how many pieces they actually sold. Somehow I don't think they do, I think they sell as many parts as they can for as much money as they can get and pay out as little money as they can to the people that designed it.

Hmmm.., well, it's not nearly as bad as the music industry, but that's a hell of a mark up for being little more than a middleman ( I refuse to write 'middleperson'.. ).
All that said, like Shaun, I have found quality bits for my projects that would be hard to make at home- or anywhere else, for that matter. It's just such a shame that such talented people can be exploited in this way. If Shapeways' cut only amounted to 20%, that would be fairer to the contributors/designers, and, hopefully the customers too...
We mustn't forget, though, that this is the age of 'Gordon Gecko', and his 'Greed is good! ' mantra.

On Shapeways designer decides about markup. It could be 0% it could be 1000% I know because I'm selling some stuff there. Mostly small railroad models but my markup is usualy about 1 EUR.

Max-U52 wrote:I'm not positive, but I believe the designer gets 20% for each piece sold, and that's assuming that shapeways tells the designer how many pieces they actually sold. Somehow I don't think they do, I think they sell as many parts as they can for as much money as they can get and pay out as little money as they can to the people that designed it.

SW set the price to print the part then the designer sets their own markup minus a small % fee.

RobW wrote:You can, but how many of the people on here can drive CAD to a standard where they can add the lettering? Yes, they are expensive, but because we do this as a hobby we neglect the time element in a lot of stuff. To design & CAD up the cans is probably around 4-5 hours unless there's an easy way of adding letters?

The CAD time in those Jerry Cans is 2hrs top i would say. I done my own and for a good user or someone who works in these circles is minimal effort.
Lettering is dead easy on professional equipment.
Although with the new tech we have access to you could draw up a JC in less than 15mins by scanning in a real object and then converting to a solid.

But you are correct, most of us do this as a hobby and therefore take the cost in time as acceptable as we do it for fun, these guys are professional printers and designers and therefore are charging as such. Which makes their parts soo expensive for anyone else looking in.
In some ways this is good as we don't want everyone to have the very special model we may have taken alot of time to build and spent countless hours on, but then there is sthe other extreme the cost puts new people really getting into the hobby.

Personally i love nothing more than to sit down in the evening after work either building models and assembling new parts i have printed and designed or designing new stuff.
I personally try to keep the cost low so others can enjoy, keeps your interest to do more in future. But then also limit what you print off for others so a few people may have something similar but not everyone. Plus i only charge what i am comfortable with.