Thanks Joey
I've been plugging away at the programs pretty hard and also had one of my friends who's much more experienced with modelling is going over everything to clean up errors before sending it out. I'll have to check on the rivet dimension but I think it's right about .5mm maybe slightly smaller?
The parts showed up yesterday, I did a mold of the shield last night and here's the first casting which I'm quite pleased with.
(sheild is 20mm in diameter)
The cast was made direct from the printed part, no sanding or clean up work. Needless to say it's incredibly clean and there's no visable stepping or laying marks. The printed underside surface (the back of the sheild ) has no discernable differance in quality. I was blown away with how much better this came out than the shapeways version.
The very slight ridges on the shield face are part of how the model's wireframe is constructed (not the printing), I'll be tweaking that a bit so that it'll be completely smooth on the next print.
The handle is a little clumpy looking due to my messing with it and over applying superglue, the printing was really clean but I messed it up while trying to fill the small gap behind the handle with styrene so that it could be cast as one part. With such a tiny bit It was an exercise in frustration and I think I will be having the shield reprinted with a seperate handle (when I submit the tower shield) that way it'll be two parts. Which will improve the molding step and won't wear on the production molds as much.
Totally blown away with how clean these came out and will definately be using moddler again.
I have both axes molding at current and will hopefully have an update later tonight.