CT21 · Kent
3D printing in Saltwood
Everything ordered from Saltwood has to survive the ridge. Sun, salt carried up off the Channel and a wind that finds every unsupported edge, which is why ASA and PETG do almost all the work here, and PLA does none of it.
Delivery first, because it is the question Saltwood asks: the run from the workshop takes about fifteen minutes, orders over £40 come to the village, and anything smaller is posted or collected. There is no distance loading in the price, here or anywhere else on this list.
The businesses this page is written for are the ones that look after land and old buildings on the ridge. Grounds-maintenance and estate contractors, a few equestrian yards, and the joiners, glaziers and small building firms working on listed and pre-war housing around the green. What they have in common is that their consumable hardware has no supplier: the glasshouse model was discontinued in 2011, the gate furniture was made on site, and the machine is fifteen years old and running perfectly apart from one plastic part.
Saltwood also sits high and open. Hythe, tucked below, is partly sheltered; the ridge is not, and that pushes almost everything outdoors into ASA.
Saltwood is estate and smallholding country on the ridge above Hythe, and the businesses here are the ones that look after land and old buildings: groundcare and grounds-maintenance contractors, estate managers, a scattering of equestrian yards, and the joiners, glaziers and building firms who work on listed and pre-war housing. What they order is repair hardware for things that no longer have a supplier: glasshouse and cold-frame fittings, gate and stable furniture, machinery spares, and because everything sits on an exposed ridge, almost all of it is quoted in ASA rather than PLA.
Getting parts up to the village
Orders over £40 are delivered; below that, collection in Folkestone or first-class post are both quicker than waiting for a delivery run to line up. Standard turnaround is three to five working days counted from the file being agreed, not from the first email.
Where a job starts with a broken part rather than a drawing (which for Saltwood it usually does) post it or drop it in. A photograph next to a steel rule gets us most of the way; callipers on the real thing get the tolerances right first time, and on a glazing clip the tolerance is the entire job.
For contractors running the same kit across several sites, it is worth quoting the whole set at once. One job's worth of setup, one delivery, and the batch tiers start at five identical parts.
What the ridge orders
Glasshouse and cold-frame hardware
Grounds and estate contractors
Glazing clips, W-clips, vent-arm parts, door rollers and the aluminium-frame fittings that manufacturers stop supplying about four years after they stop making the model. Printed in ASA, because a summer under glass concentrates both heat and light and will distort a PLA clip in its first hot week.
Gate, stable and outbuilding furniture
Equestrian yards, estate managers
Latch bodies, gate-stop blocks, hinge bushes, kick-bolt covers and the plastic ends of things that were only ever sold as a complete unit. Most are an evening's print and cost less than the postage on an official spare, where one still exists.
Groundcare machinery spares
Maintenance contractors
Mower deck clips, strimmer spool caps, blower nozzle holders, hose-reel handles and hopper fittings. Modelled from the broken original, and thickened where the original failed because it was made too thin in the first place.
Period ironmongery patterns
Joiners and glaziers
Sash hardware, curtain-pole brackets, letterplate springs and door furniture for houses whose fittings pre-date any current standard: either as the finished part, or as a printed pattern for casting.
Exposed positions, and what to specify for them
The default for anything outdoors on the ridge is ASA, which keeps its impact strength and its colour under ultraviolet where PLA fades, chalks and eventually crumbles. PETG is the middle option: far better than PLA in sun and heat, and about the same price.
Inside a glasshouse is harsher than outside one, because glass concentrates both heat and light. That is one of the very few cases where we will decline to quote PLA even if it is asked for.
For anything that carries a constant load (a bush, a bearing carrier, a hopper fitting) PETG-CF is the sensible specification. It is stiffer and creeps far less than unfilled plastic over a season.
Every filament we stock, with the price per kilogram and what each one is actually for, is listed on the materials page. If you are not sure which one a Saltwood job needs, tell us where the part lives and what it has to survive.
Service area
Saltwood to the workshop, and back
Saltwood is 3.5 miles from the machines by road, due west on the ridge above Hythe. Everything is printed in Folkestone and travels out from there. There is no second site and no subcontracting, which is why a reorder six months later comes off the same machines with the same settings.
- Sandgate, CT20, 1.5 miles by road from the workshop, west-south-west of Folkestone.
- Saltwood, CT21, 3.5 miles by road from the workshop, west of Folkestone.
- Hythe, CT21, 4 miles by road from the workshop, west-south-west of Folkestone.
- Lyminge, CT18, 7 miles by road from the workshop, north-west of Folkestone.
Questions from Saltwood
Three things businesses here ask first
Yes, free on orders over £40, and the run takes about fifteen minutes.
Below that it is collection from Folkestone or Royal Mail, whichever suits. The village is close enough that most people collect.
That is the ideal case. One intact example gives every dimension we need, and we print a test pair to check the fit before running the rest.
Clips like these are cheapest in a batch of twenty or more, because setup is spread across the run rather than carried by a single part.
In ASA, several years of British weather without meaningful change. That is what the material was designed for.
In PLA, expect visible chalking within a year and brittleness after that. Outdoor parts are quoted in ASA unless you tell us otherwise.
There are more answers on the frequently asked questions page, the full pricing model is written out on the pricing page, and what we will and will not take on is set out on the capabilities page.
What we can print for a business in Saltwood
Iterate in days
Rapid prototyping
Hold the revision before you commit to tooling, a supplier or a production run. First iteration on the plate within one working day of the file arriving.
From £30.00
10 to 200 units
Small-batch production
Repeat runs of ten to two hundred identical parts from one held file, with no tooling bill and a per-unit price that steps down at 5, 10, 25 and 50 units. Small-batch 3D printing for UK businesses, printed in Kent and posted anywhere.
From £30.00
Shop-floor tooling
Jigs, fixtures & tooling
Drill guides, assembly fixtures, alignment jigs, gauges and mounts, made to the dimensions of your bench rather than to a catalogue's.
From £30.00
Discontinued components
One-off & replacement parts
The component that failed on a machine the manufacturer stopped supporting. Measured with callipers, corrected where the original was weak, and reprinted.
From £30.00
£42 per hour
3D design & CAD
For businesses with an idea, a sketch or a sample but no model. £42 per hour, quoted against an estimate before work starts, and you own the files.
£42.00 per hour
Nearest areas to Saltwood
Every area page covers a different local trade. The service area index lists all 14, with distances, postcodes and how parts reach each one.
Next step
Drop an STL or 3MF into the quote page and you get a price and a lead time straight away. The file is read in your own browser: it is not uploaded unless you send it with an order, which matters if the drawing is confidential.