Tuesday, March 8, 2022

New 3D Printed Sci-Fi Lamp Design

For some reason, I find myself designing and printing a lot of lamps. Here's the latest, designed in Fusion360 to fit a Feit Electric G63 vintage LED filament bulb that is 8" in diameter.

I like combining the antique look of the bulb with a "modern" base- it looks like something out of an old Buck Rogers movie (the movies from the 30s and 40s, not the awful TV series from the 80s).

The lamp base prints in vase mode. I printed it using PETG, a 1 mm nozzle, 1.2 mm line width, 0.5mm layer height, in about 4 hours at 30 mm/sec. Prusa Slicer vase mode has been broken for years and leaves a seam down the side of the print, so I sliced with Cura. No seam at all!


The overall height is 400 mm, the print is 300 mm tall. The bulb barely rises above ambient temperature, even after hours of operation, so there's no danger of melting or softening the PETG print.


A look down inside the print. You can see the tiny facets that make up the "curved" surface of the print. Maybe I need to export the STL file with even smaller segments.


Power off.


Power on- the bulb socket is quite visible at this angle. View it from a little higher or lower and the socket all but disappears due to the way the print layers scatter light.




Bottle for scale...

I'll probably print a cone using opaque white filament to cover the socket for this lamp. I'm also going to try printing the whole thing in opaque filament to see what that looks like. I'll post pictures when I do.

The Fusion360 Step file is here. You'll need a 280x280x300 mm (or larger) print capacity machine to print it, and I recommend a 1mm nozzle. You'll find the lamp is saved as a solid object. In the slicer you will use vase mode which will have no infill, a single wall, and no top layers. I printed in PETG, used 3 or 4 bottom layers, and set the line width to 1.2 mm. The resulting print is quite sturdy and very tough. I drilled a hole between the fins near the bottom of the lamp to feed in the line cord because I thought it would look better than running the cord out through a hole in the edge of one of the fins.

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