So, after pulling my hair out trying to find this separate piece, I gave up and decided to reduce the thickness of the "finished floor" by 1mm just to see how much money this would knock off the total price. It turns out 1mm translates out to about an $18 savings. More importantly, though, the product no longer registered as having "thin walls" or multiple parts! The loose piece didn't exist (thank goodness) and, as designed, all of the walls were reading as having acceptable dimensions. The problem was just some mathematical artifact in the file's coding picked up from somewhere. The new, thinner, file didn't have such errors. Success!
But wait. Not so fast. I knocked off a few more millimeters here and there (things I decided weren't essential and probably wouldn't actually help much) just to see how much more I could get the price to drop, uploaded the new file to Shapeways, and suddenly two of my old friends reappeared. Now knowing what to look for, I was able to find them much more quickly. For some reason, part of one of the seats was not registering and this was causing the stanchion connected to that seat to be attached to nothing. (This is where the multiple parts issue came from.) The other problem, it turns out, is being caused by a shape emanating from one of the windbreaks. This shape is too thin for the printing constraints.
Here's the kicker: none of these issues are representative of the 3D model I've created. I can't just fix them on my end, because they're non-existent. This means that there's either an error in the exporting process from Google Sketchup's native file format (.skp) to Collada (.dae) which is one of the acceptable file types for Shapeways, or the problem is with Shapeways and they way their computers are reading such files.
Either way, I have no solution at present.
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