[Blake]

Hi Andrew
I am working with my foundry on all of this and they have a good amount of expertise already.
They jumped on this right away and have lent a good deal of clout, that I don't have myself, so we are making good progress.

We are restricted, of course, by health and safety issues, which would prevent the use of "a blast with straight oxygen".

However, we can burn out the shell at high temperature and for extended periods of time.

We have used a vapor smoothing technique on the PLA to remove stratification but that comes with a certain level of danger as well so we are investigating different materials in order to prevent stratification.

I was pushing for some of the power printers at .50 microns to avoid those pesky lines on the surface but that has not worked out so far. Although, few options have been eliminated at this point.

I am not aware of the exact name of the next material we will test as we are going through a lot of them and it is all in Italian (foundry Venturi Arte Bologna).

There are a lot of materials coming onto the market at the moment, but believe me, when we find the perfect material I will let you know.

Happy sculpting, Blake