What We Do:

Resources:

About us.

Chapel Prints Co is a small freelance designer and publisher of 3D objects. We focus on educational models and have a strong skill set which allows us to bring an idea all the way from inception into the physical world.

We’re not an on demand 3D printing service, nor a digital design house, we’re proud generalists bringing prototyping and specialist manufacture to you on a cottage industry scale.

What can Chapel Prints do for you?

  • We have an academic background in the natural sciences and a strong interest in ecology and wildlife. we’ve earned a practical knowledge of woodwork, pottery, painting and electronics. And naturally, we have an overbearing familiarity with all things tied to 3D printing.

  • When approached to create a model of a proposed development we were able to translate the CAD data into a suitable 3D model.

  • A Scottish potter wanted a positive mould of a topographical map of Ulva off Mull; we could design a cut-out print suited for the job. 

  • When Asked if we could supply replica skulls for a local zoo to be exhibited alongside the Natural History Museum's Photographer of the Year, we knew what species would catch the imagination and did it within a 2 week turn around.

  • A whiskey distillery in Fife wanted a 250 item custom order of maps; we could annotate them to highlight key fields that supply their malt.

  • Approach with a limited grant we could scan-in, render, print, and finish a series of Anglo-Saxon grave goods for a school workshop. 

  • We are proud generalists, with the skills to help you with your commission or small scale R&D project.

About 3D Printing.

The ability to transform digital assets and data into physical objects is only possible thanks to affordable 3D printers. We use FDM and SLA printing technologies alongside, silicon, sand, and plaster casting. The modern materials of PLA filament and UV resin used to their best ability in tandem with more traditional materials of wood, epoxy, pewter and even silver.

Only when 3D printing is combined with asset libraries, 3D scanning, and model design, does is strength really show. Scanning, file conversion, and 3D sculpting are skills we’re confident and well verse-in.

You can find-out more about 3D printing and scanning, as well as, browse our published files from the links below.

Our Clients

  • A commission set of wildlife replicas (beetle, cuttlefish, sika deer).

    A 3D printed topography map of Brownsea Isle.

  • Two 3D printed topographical maps.

  • Ongoing commission.

  • On going paw print stamp project with help from Jackson Sage at the Humber Nature Partnership.

  • A commission set of wildlife replicas for Science Oxford.

  • Naked Mole Rat (life-like) model for Oxford Museum.

  • 250 items of 3D topographical map of Fife for Inchdairnie Distillery’s gift boxes.

  • Weathered Big Horn skull replica for the Draper Museum.

  • Anglo-Saxon grave good set.

    Tactile display pieces.

    3 mini exhibitions.

  • Tactile display set.

  • large 100cm by 100cm 3D printed topography map for Haslemere Museum.

  • Large 100cm by 75cm 3d topography map for the nature tour company Wild Herzegovina.

  • A commission set of wildlife replicas.

FAQs:

  • I won’t beat around the bush; we offer value for money. We use 3D printing but ultimately, we don’t see is as the be all and end all - we want to make good quality educational models. We combine hand painting, finishing, fillers, and elbow grease.

    If you have a big budget (We’re talked tens of thousands here) companies like the brilliant Odyssey Studios offer the gold standard of model making.

    Similarly, you want an exhibit set scanning in? Companies like Heritage360 are great but have large teams and expensive kit to pay for.

    We have a strong background in natural sciences, a useful skill-set of practical knowledge and as a small-scale freelancer can offer services for hundreds not thousands.

  • We’re currently working on a skull that’s 3 meters long! We’ve completed maps measuring a meter squared… Because of delivery costs, and damage in transit; we prefer to work on items 60cm cubed and under. Be we can discuss larger projects within the UK, as long as, you understand delivery can be an issues/expensive.

  • Our SLA printers can print to a 0.05mm (50 micron) accuracy. In practice we’ve printed items successfully under 1cm cubed. Because 3D printers use support material which must be manually removed, and prints this small are so delicate – we only guarantee quality prints of 2 centimeters and up.

  • No! Metal 3D printers do now exist, printers like Terran R’s Stargate 4th gen printer don’t have price tags, but in time will be used to print rockets and such. These companies deal in billions of dollars of funding. Metal 3D printers like this are not, and never will be, printing a mental version of your Winston Churchill Bust… Gary…


    There are various methods for combining 3D printing and metal manufacturing which we’re exploring. We can create pewter and silver versions of small 3D prints and are looking to expand into aluminum casting.

  • We paint our models by hand using airbrushes, hand brush and finishing techniques. Colour 3D printers do exist. These are all over the £100,000 price tag and many are a little lacking in their colour quality. So being a small scale freelancer, we paint by hand and by eye using more traditional techniques.

  • Yes, almost certainly. Thanks to satellite captured Lidar databases the whole global has had is topography captured to a resolution of around 25-30 meters. Some countries like the US and UK have aerial captured Lidar good down to 1-5 meters. So yep; if you can give us a location we’ll probably be able to print it.

  • Probably. We have only turned away one or two skull replica commissions because we couldn’t source data. We have a big collection of skulls from UK based species, there are various copyright free digital models of many species. For a Sika Deer skull we found no models anywhere, so we took the closest species we could find and altered it to be anatomically accurate to the Sika species.

  • Yes, for the right project. We can print production lines from the 10-1000 item mark depending on the commission.

  • Indeed, if we came front the Iron Age, we must surely be in the Plastic Age now.

    This is partly why we’re keen on producing educational replicas of the natural world, items of value beyond their physical worth. Our favourite and most used material is PLA a corn-starch bio plastic produced from plants not oil. It has at least the potential to be carbon neutral as a material and does eventually biodegrade (quite quickly at industrial composting facilities).

    We’re slowly shifting to Soy based UV resin for our SLA printers and generally looking at ways to reduce our carbon and pollution footprint.