Questions
The things a buyer asks before placing an order
Grouped in the order they usually come up: can you hit the deadline, can you repeat it in six months, what tolerance do you hold, and can you invoice us.
- Standard lead time
- 5–7 working days
- Minimum order
- £30
- Typical tolerance
- ±0.3 mm
9 questions
Ordering, lead times and limits
Standard is 3 to 5 working days from the point the design is agreed, not from the point the enquiry lands. Express is 48 hours and adds 25%. Next working day is available subject to what is already on the plates and adds 50%.
Those are honest figures rather than optimistic ones. A single small part is often ready the next working day even on the standard option. A 150-unit batch, or anything needing a sanded or smoothed finish, takes longer, and you will be given the real date before you commit rather than an encouraging one afterwards.
If you have a fixed date (a trade show, a customer visit, a line restart) say so in your first message. You will get a straight answer about whether it is achievable.
Yes. Express turnaround is 48 hours at a 25% premium, and next working day is 50% where the queue allows it. The premium is not a penalty. It is the cost of moving other people's work, running the machines overnight and doing the finishing outside normal hours.
The realistic limit is machine time, not willingness. A part needing eleven hours on the plate cannot be delivered in six however much anyone pays. Ring rather than email if the job is genuinely urgent, and you will get an immediate answer about what is possible.
The minimum order value is £30. There is no minimum quantity: one part is a perfectly normal order, and plenty of our work is exactly that.
The floor exists because a job costs roughly the same amount of a person's attention whether it produces one part or five: opening the file, checking wall thicknesses and overhangs, choosing an orientation, slicing, loading the plate, inspecting the result and raising the invoice. Below £30 we would be paying to take the work, and a low minimum mostly generates enquiries that consume a working day and return four pounds.
Comfortably up to about 200 units. Between 200 and 500 is possible and worth a conversation first. Above roughly 500 identical parts, injection moulding is cheaper per unit even after paying for the tool, and we will tell you that rather than quote for it.
The practical limit on any batch is the part's footprint rather than the quantity. A 40 mm clip nests dozens to a plate, so 200 of them is a few days of machine time. A 200 mm housing is one per plate, so 50 of them is a fortnight. The instant estimate works this out from your actual bounding box and shows the plate count.
It is reprinted at our cost and the delivery date is held wherever possible. A failure allowance of 6% is built openly into every quote, precisely so that a failed print is our problem rather than a conversation about who pays for it.
On a batch we check the first pieces off each plate before the rest of the run continues, so a fault costs one part rather than fifty. If a problem turns out to be systematic: a wall that is marginal, geometry that will not print reliably in that orientation: we stop the run and call you rather than producing ninety parts with the same flaw.
If a part reaches you and is not right, tell us. It gets reprinted. We would rather absorb a reprint than have a customer quietly decide we are not worth the risk.
Weapons and weapon components, anything designed to defeat a lock or a security device, and anything that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or registered design.
We also decline food-contact and medical parts. Printed layer lines trap bacteria and cannot be reliably cleaned, and we cannot certify a part as safe for either use, so it would be dishonest to take the work.
Nothing we print carries a material certificate, a batch trace or a load rating, so certified and safety-critical parts, lifting points and anything load-bearing above a person are also out. If your job sits near one of these lines, ask: a two-minute answer is better than a week of waiting.
That is what the recorded print recipe is for. Material, colour, layer height, wall count, infill, orientation and support settings are all stored against your job, so the second run is printed the same way as the first rather than merely similarly.
Expect about ±0.15 mm of variation between runs from the same settings on the same machine. If anything has to change: a filament reformulated, a colour discontinued, a material withdrawn: you hear about it before the parts are made, not when they arrive.
A reorder is usually a one-line email: the job reference and a quantity. There is no repeat setup charge and no repeat of the file check.
256 × 256 × 256 mm in a single piece, which is the build envelope of every machine in the workshop: roughly the size of a football.
Larger parts are split and bonded. We choose a seam that suits the geometry, add locating pins so the sections align without a jig, and put the joint where it will not be looked at. Bonded PETG and ABS joints are close to parent-material strength.
If your file is too large for one plate, the estimator tells you the exact percentage you would need to scale it down by, so you can decide between scaling and splitting.
The estimator checks your bounding box against the envelope in all six orientations, allowing 4 mm of clearance on every axis, and tells you immediately if it will not go.
You then have two choices. Scale it down, and the tool shows the exact percentage needed. Or let us split it: send the file over and we will propose a seam, quote the sections and print them with locating pins so they align when they are bonded.
For a functional part, splitting is almost always the better answer. Scaling changes every clearance, every wall thickness and every hole in the model at once.
4 questions
Materials, tolerance and strength
Typically ±0.3 mm on a part up to 100 mm, with a little more drift on larger parts as the material contracts. That is the honest figure, not the best one we have ever measured.
Three effects account for most of it. Holes print undersized by roughly 0.1 to 0.2 mm, because each layer of a curve is laid as a series of straight moves inside the intended circle. The first layer spreads under the nozzle, adding up to 0.2 mm to the base. And the part shrinks as it cools: a fraction of a percent in PLA and PETG, noticeably more in ABS and ASA across a long flat face.
None of that is a problem if the model allows for it. We design to 0.2 mm for a close sliding fit, 0.3 to 0.4 mm for a free fit, and nominal plus 0.3 mm for a clearance hole. If one dimension has to be tighter, say which: a single critical feature can often be printed oversize and reamed or faced afterwards, which is far cheaper than machining the whole part.
Strong along the layers and weaker across them. Most failures we are asked to look at are parts printed the wrong way up rather than parts made from the wrong plastic, so orientation is the first thing we decide and the first thing we will ask you about.
A bracket loaded in bending wants its layers running along the arm rather than stacked across it. Tell us which direction the load comes from and the part will be oriented for it. If the geometry means the load has to cross the layers, we will say so before printing rather than after it breaks.
PETG-CF is the toughest thing we hold, combining impact resistance with stiffness. PLA-CF is stiffer still but brittle. Plain PLA is the stiffest common filament and also the one most likely to snap.
Work down four questions. Will it live outdoors permanently? ASA. Will it get hot: engine bay, heater, hot car? ABS or ASA, or PETG for anything up to about 70°C. Does it need to squash, seal or grip? TPU. Must a face stay flat under clamp load? PLA-CF indoors, PETG-CF if it will also be knocked about.
If none of those apply, PETG for anything functional and PLA for prototypes and indoor fixtures. PLA Matte if a customer will look at the part, because it hides layer lines off the plate and costs far less than sanding.
Choosing wrong is the single most common reason a printed part fails in service. Describe where the part will live and what it has to survive, and you will get a straight recommendation rather than an upsell.
Black, white, grey and natural are held in PLA and PETG as standard, which covers most work with no waiting.
Anything else is ordered in and usually arrives within two to three working days, at no extra cost unless the colour only exists in a specialist finish. Silk and matte ranges come in a wide choice of colours.
We do not print multi-colour parts on a single body. Where a part needs two colours the cleaner answer is almost always two parts joined, and we will quote it that way.
4 questions
Files, IP and confidentiality
STL and 3MF go straight into the instant estimate, in both ASCII and binary form, up to 60 MB. 3MF is the better of the two if your CAD offers it, because it records the units in the file and cannot arrive at a hundredth of the intended size.
STEP, IGES, OBJ, native SolidWorks, Fusion 360 and SketchUp files, and dimensioned PDF or DXF drawings all come by email and are quoted by hand, usually the same working day. STEP is the format to send if we may need to modify the geometry.
If you have no file at all, that is fine too. Photographs next to a steel rule, a dimensioned sketch, or the broken original in the post are all enough to start from.
No. The estimator opens and measures your file entirely inside your browser, using your own computer's processor. Nothing is sent to us and nothing is stored on a server, so you can price a confidential or unreleased design without it leaving your machine.
Your file only travels at the point you choose to attach it to an order or an enquiry. If you close the tab before then, no copy exists anywhere but on your own device.
You do, entirely. Sending us a file gives us permission to make your parts and nothing else. We do not resell, republish, reuse or add customers' designs to any portfolio, and we do not use them as examples without asking.
Files are kept only as long as we need them to complete your order and cover any reprint, then deleted. If you would like them removed sooner, say so and you will get confirmation once it is done.
You do not need an NDA to get a quote: the terms above apply by default. If your procurement process requires one, send yours with the enquiry and it will come back signed.
Always, and before we take your money. Every file is opened and looked at by a person rather than fed straight into a slicer.
The usual problems are walls under about 1.2 mm that will be fragile, unsupported overhangs steeper than 45 degrees, holes drawn at nominal size that will print undersized, embossed text below about 4 mm cap height that a 0.4 mm nozzle cannot resolve, and non-manifold geometry that looks fine on screen and slices into nonsense.
You get a short message describing what we saw and the smallest change that fixes it. Fixing a wall thickness in CAD takes five minutes; discovering it after a batch of fifty does not.
4 questions
Pricing and invoicing
From what the job genuinely consumes, itemised so you can see every line: filament by weight at the real spool price, electricity at 24.89p per kWh, machine time including wear and depreciation, consumables, a 6% reprint allowance and hands-on labour at £24 an hour. A 35% margin is added to that subtotal, then the batch and turnaround multipliers are applied.
The important detail is that labour is charged per plate rather than per part. Ten minutes is charged once per job for the file check, orientation and slicing; six minutes once per plate for loading, starting, removing and clearing; and only 48 seconds per part for the individual quality check. You do not pull fifty parts off a plate one at a time, so you are not billed as though we did.
The whole model is published on the pricing page with worked examples, and every line appears in your own estimate.
The published multiplier steps down at 5, 10, 25 and 50 units, reaching 25% off at fifty or more. That is the visible part, and it is the smaller effect.
The larger effect is structural. Because setup is charged per job and handling per plate, both are shared across everything on the plate. On a small part that nests dozens to a plate, the per-unit price between one and two hundred can fall by a factor of twenty. On a large part that is one per plate it falls far less, because each unit still needs its own plate change.
This is why footprint matters more than volume for batch pricing, and why reorienting a part is often the cheapest change available if a batch price looks high.
Yes. Every job is invoiced, with your purchase order number carried onto the invoice if you send one with the order. New customers settle on completion, before collection or dispatch. Once we have worked together, 14-day terms are straightforward to set up.
Payment is by bank transfer or card. Batch orders over £250 can be split into a deposit and a balance on delivery: ask when you order.
We are not VAT registered, so there is no VAT to add and nothing for you to reclaim. The figure quoted is the figure invoiced.
Almost always. It is modelled from your geometry rather than sliced from your file, which is why we call it an estimate rather than a quotation.
Before anything is printed we slice the file properly and confirm. If the real figure is lower, you pay the lower one. If unusual geometry, heavy support requirements or very thin walls push it materially higher, you are told why before we start and you are free to walk away.
1 question
Collection and delivery
Collection in Folkestone is free and usually the fastest option: we agree a time once your parts are off the plate. It is the normal arrangement for local businesses and for anything urgent.
Delivery is free to Folkestone, Sandgate, Cheriton, Hythe, Saltwood and Hawkinge on orders over £40. Further afield in East Kent: Dover, Ashford, Canterbury, Deal, New Romney and the Elham Valley villages: delivery is by arrangement, and we are often over that way anyway.
Everywhere else in the UK goes by tracked Royal Mail or courier, charged at cost and shown before you pay. Parts are packed so they arrive intact rather than merely so they arrive.
2 questions
Design and CAD
Yes, and roughly half the enquiries that become orders start that way. Send photographs with a steel rule in shot, a dimensioned sketch, a scan, or the physical original by post, and we measure it with digital callipers and model it.
Design is charged at £42 an hour, with the hours estimated and agreed before any work starts. A simple bracket, clip or spacer is typically two to four hours; a full enclosure with board standoffs, port cut-outs and fixings is usually eight to sixteen. You see a render or a STEP file for approval before anything is printed.
You own the output (native source, a STEP export and a print-ready STL or 3MF) whether or not you print it with us.
Yes, and it is a common job. Draft angles get removed, wall thicknesses corrected to whole multiples of the extrusion width, unsupported overhangs designed out and hole sizes adjusted for the shrinkage the material actually shows.
It is charged as design work at the hourly rate, with an estimate first. For a bridge run of a part while tooling is being cut, it is usually a few hours well spent: printing a moulded design unmodified is the most reliable way to produce a batch of disappointing parts.
Still unanswered?
Every question above came from a real enquiry. If yours is not here, it is worth asking. The answer is usually short, and it is always from the person who would do the work rather than from a sales desk. Technical questions are welcome before you have decided to order anything.
For anything urgent, the phone is faster than email. For anything involving geometry, the fastest route is usually to send the file or a photograph with a steel rule in shot.
Direct
- hello@pixelcraftedprints.co.uk
- 07424 344734
- Monday to Friday, 09:00–17:30
- Saturday, 10:00–14:00
- Sunday, closed
Next step
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