Good morning.

[John S]

Mr Gnome,
Just as the printed article had flaws in it the subtraction method with have tool marks that may not appeal to your accuracy without hand cleaning up or a very light bead blast.
That's just the nature of the beast and just making you aware of it.

Looking at your examples you will need a 3D CAM program to produce much of this work so allow around £500 to 1K for a decent program otherwise you are limiting yourself too much.

[Mad Gnome]

Thanks for your reply John S. Is it possible that you could enlarge on your comments re 3D CAM program. Do you mean the type of software often applied to Roland machines?

The need to clean up after machining is not a problem, this being a normal task undertaken after my hand operated machining, but the printed objects really do have an awful surface finish, and that was when the SolidScape machine was printing at its highest resolution. I heeded the story told to me by a person who makes scratch kits for model locomotives and rolling stock. His process is briefly, draw part in solid and export as .stl, build via wax deposition, send wax pattern for investment pattern, repair the new brass pattern and make good missing profiles etc, send repaired brass pattern back to foundry for RTV moulds to be created, make multiple wax patterns from RTV mould for casting, for customers. A frightening process. So that's why I wish to go go down the path of computer guided cutting; also the model on which I am working at this moment has a great deal of aluminium castings, which would benefit from very accurite production.