The AI shells are phenomenal. Make no mistake.
Just needs a couple coasters and either some coffee mugs or beer cans/bottles and you'll have yourself a right nice couple of mini-tables there.
Hooray for Neo-themed furniture!
I'm sure there is a lot you could do to lower the required plastic volume and drop the price that would make it a little more suited to 3D printing as well, such as honeycomb support structures inside and thinner plastic walls.
Quan, what are we talking design times to redo them for a 3d printer? We could start another kickstarter to pay for your time.
What resolution does shapeways print at? Less than 50 microns would be nice but I'm going to assume it's 100.
Quan,
I have used a place 40 miles north of me that can even print metal! Cant really say for sure if their prices are reasonable or not but it might be worth looking into! http://www.rapidmade.com/
Printing in general isn't really an effective way to produce item beyond the prototyping phase unless you own the 3d printer. At the prices shapeways is asking, I may as well buy my own and see what the costs turn out to be.
Aww, that's a shame, with them only charging you for the material used and not the overall size of the object, as well as the 40% discounts on anything passed a certain size I though it would come out to less.
Does something like a Makerbot Replicator have a build area large enough to print the carts? If you could print multiples it wouldn't require too much labor, but it would certainly take ages.
The build area on the newest Replicator is 9.9 x 7.8 x 5.9 inches and a neo cart is 5.875 x 7.4 x 1.375 inches, meaning if you really max it out you could probably print 6 or 7 at once maybe? The biggest issue here though would be the large amount of supports required and removing them from the finished print easily and effectively.
A possible solution to that could be a printer with a dual extruder like the Replicator 2X (though it does have a smaller build volume) that way the supports could be printed in a water dissolvable plastic and would take far less labor to remove.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCpp6SmvlJo
Print a stack of shells separated by water soluble PVA, dump stack in tub.. Profit?