Hi! I have recently made a some new puzzles in solidwork, and now I'm gonna prototype a bunch of them on Shapeways*.
I uploaded them, and I got a strange difference in price. One of my puzzle is 116.38$ and has 133.17 cm³. The other is 99.12 cm³ and cost 150.18$ .

Note : - They are both in white strong and flexible and not polished.
- In the bunch of puzzle I will print there will be my master skewb diamond, my golden skewb diamond and a jing's pyraminx void "nomech", plus a secret amazing huge puzzle ( I haven't finished designing it (it remains just the fillets, but I'm too lazy ), and it will cost over 9000 )

*Edit

Assuming you are uploading these to Shapeways, that is probably because of the density discount. See the material page on Shapeways for a more in-depth explanation.

Sorry if the question seems dumb, but density is based on what? Does the wall thickness affects it?
Because I wonder if the density is higher when the wall thickness is larger, does that mean its cheaper?
So if you don't shell your pieces, your puzzle is cheaper?

The density is calculated by creating a "bounding box" surrounding the model that lines up with the 3 axes. The volume of the model is divided by the volume of the box to calculate the density, and if the density is above 10%, the discount is included. Because of this, increasing the wall thickness of a model can be used to get the density discount, but it is usually best to just place the pieces as close together as possible, as long as they are not too close that they fuse while printing.

The last time I did a Shapeways print I created a spreadsheet so I could play around with the volume of material vs the volume of the model and maximise my discount. I even included a few extra pieces for another model which I essentially got for half price.

Yeah, I thought of that. Because one of my puzzle must be printed all assembled, and it is void. So I thought of putting pieces of another puzzle in it.

I highly advise against printing puzzles fully assembled in WSF. The amount of space you need to leave between surfaces for them not to fuse is far too big for a puzzle to work at all. Make an assembly of your pieces laid out along a plane, and then you will be able to assemble them when they arrive.

-Eitan

I'm afraid of not being able to assemble it if I print the parts separately. Because the pieces are held together ("interlocking"), like the mechanism of the "gift cube" (<-- i think) by Oskar, but without face that opens. So it doesn't have a core to screw the last center piece.

Feel free to give me advices



please don't steal my mechanism!


Note: Much of this text is translated from french to english by google translate, and so the previous posts.

The parts will definitely fuse if you want to print the puzzle assembled. One possibility would be to split several of the parts into multiple pieces that can be glued or screwed together around the mechanism, or you could try doing something like how the void cube edges are split in two parts.