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All jokes aside as Michael says that's a big bit of resin and Shapeways is expensive anyway. I wanted this in 28mm and the price doubles in size for a print, $20 at 15mm, $40 at 20mm and $80+ for 28mm. And the Semple is a tad smaller than the T29 ....
Also remember that they charge for machine space as well as amount of material. Everything is measured in cubic centimeters. As the overall dimensions increase, even if just by, say, 1 cm, that's still 1cm added to the height, length and width so the volume of that cube increase by a large amount.
So lets say I have a box that's 3cm cubed, 3x3x3. Lets do the math to find the volume. The area of one side of that cube is 3x3=9 square cm. To find the volume it's area cubed. So 9x9x9 which is 729 cubic centimeters. Now lets increase the dimensions by 1 cm. 4x4=16 square cm. 16x16x16=4,096 cubic centimeters. A dimensional increase of just 1 cm has increased the total volume of a 3x3x3 cube by a factor of approximately 5.62. Now in terms of machining and 3D printing, that is a lot of material! One way to cut down on costs is to make as many parts as possible hollow so the material cost is low. If the part is large then the machine space costs will still be rather high, though.
Now to test this I quickly made a couple cubes, 1 3x3x3 and another 4x4x4. To print the solid 4x4x4 cube, it would cost $35.02. The price of the 3x3x3 solid is $15.88. So yes, it is expensive, but it's also based on machine space.
