How a job runs, from your CAD export to your bench

STL and 3MF drop straight into the instant estimate and price themselves in the browser: your file is measured on your own machine and is never uploaded. 3MF is the better of the two if your CAD offers it, because it carries units and cannot arrive at a hundredth of the intended size.

Everything else comes by email and is quoted by hand, usually the same working day: STEP, IGES, OBJ, native SolidWorks, Fusion or SketchUp files, or a dimensioned PDF drawing. If there is no model at all, a photograph next to a steel rule and a set of measurements is a perfectly good starting point.

Tell us the quantity, the deadline and what the part has to survive in the same message. Those three facts decide almost everything that follows, and asking for them later costs a day.

Every file is opened by a person before it goes near a slicer. We look for walls thinner than about 0.84 mm, which is two perimeters and the point below which a part becomes fragile; overhangs steeper than 45°, which will need support; and manifold errors: inverted normals, open edges, self-intersecting shells and stray internal geometry, which make a model that looks fine on screen slice into nonsense.

We also check the small things that quietly ruin a part: embossed text under about 4 mm cap height that a 0.4 mm nozzle cannot resolve, holes drawn at nominal size that will print undersized, and features smaller than the nozzle itself that simply will not appear.

If we find something, you get a short message describing what we saw and the smallest change that fixes it: usually before we send the quote, not after you have paid. Fixing a wall thickness in CAD takes you five minutes. Finding out after a batch of fifty is expensive for both of us.

A printed part is not isotropic. It is strong along the layers and weak across them, and the great majority of failures we are asked to look at are parts that were printed the wrong way up rather than parts made from the wrong plastic. A bracket loaded in bending wants its layers running along the arm, not stacked across it.

Orientation also sets the price. Layer count is height divided by layer height, so standing a part upright rather than laying it flat can double the machine time for exactly the same volume of plastic. And it decides how much support the part needs, which is plastic, time and a surface mark you did not ask for.

The third thing it decides is which face looks good. Upward-facing surfaces come out clean, downward-facing surfaces carry support marks. If one face is the one people will see, tell us and we will orient for that instead, but we will also tell you what it costs in strength or in money.

Anything overhanging more than about 45° from vertical needs material underneath it while it prints. Supports add roughly 12% to the plastic used, add print time, and leave a slightly rough witness mark where they touch the part.

So the first move is always to avoid them. Reorienting the part removes most support requirements outright. A 45° chamfer under a hole or a boss removes it locally with no change to how the part works. Splitting a difficult part into two printed faces-down and bonded often costs less than supporting it in one piece.

Where support is genuinely needed we use tree supports with a small contact gap, which peel away cleanly and leave less to tidy. If a supported surface is a mating face, say so and we will orient so that face is unsupported.

Parts are nested across the plate so a batch runs as one job rather than as a sequence of small ones. That is where the batch price comes from. We keep 4 mm of clearance on every axis so nothing is printed hard against the edge of the build area.

The machine is chosen by the job, not by what is free. Small parts run on the machine with the finer flow control; larger jobs and anything in ABS or ASA run enclosed, where a stable chamber stops big flat parts lifting at the corners as they cool.

The first layer is watched, because a first layer that is wrong makes everything after it wrong. After that the run is monitored and any failure is reprinted at our cost. That is what the failure allowance in the price is for, and it is why the allowance sits in the quote openly rather than being buried in a margin.

Supports come off, the brim is trimmed and each part is inspected. Critical dimensions: the ones you told us mattered, or the ones that obviously mate with something: are measured with digital callipers against the model, not judged by eye.

A part that misses is reprinted, not shipped with an apology. On a batch we check the first pieces off the plate before the rest of the run continues, so a problem costs one part rather than fifty.

If a part is right but marginal: a wall that came out thinner than drawn, a hole that will need reaming, a support mark on a face you cared about: you hear about it with the delivery rather than discovering it on the bench.

Collection from Folkestone is free and usually the fastest route. We will agree a time once the parts are off the plate. Local delivery around Folkestone, Sandgate, Cheriton, Hythe, Saltwood and Hawkinge is free on orders over £40.

Further afield in East Kent: Dover, Ashford, Canterbury, Deal, New Romney and the Elham Valley: delivery is by arrangement, and everywhere else in the UK goes by tracked courier at cost, shown before you pay.

The invoice goes out with the parts, carrying your purchase order number if you sent one. We are not VAT registered, so the quoted figure is the invoiced figure.

Material, colour, layer height, wall count, infill, orientation and support settings are all recorded against your job. A repeat order six months later is printed from the same recipe, which is what makes run two match run one rather than merely resemble it.

Between runs we expect about ±0.15 mm of variation on the same machine from the same settings. If anything has to change (a filament reformulated, a colour discontinued) you hear about it before the parts are made, not after.

A reorder is usually a one-line email: the job reference and a quantity. There is no second setup charge and no repeat of the file check.