Welcome to STL File Corner!
I got a new toy for my birthday, and I’ve been using it to print things for my home. It’s a 3D printer! More specifically, a FlashForge AD5M. It’s one of those things you want for a really long time and then when you get one finally, you want to print all of the things. So if you’re a complete novice like me and want to know which files work and which ones just…don’t…hang around for a while!
The Lamp
The pattern I found for this 3D printed Sailor Moon lamp was from @subtlyfantastic on Cults3D. There is a free version without the stained glass lamp topper, but I highly suggest if you’re going to print this you go all the way with it. I will tell you the best way to bond it together a little bit further down.
Sailor Guts! The Stuff you need to make it work.
This is all designed to fit regular lamp parts. I was able to order some pretty cheap parts on Amazon that fit the bill. You can scale it up or down depending on what size you want but I just printed the pieces without scaling and it fit a 12″ pole.
For the bulb I picked up a wifi enabled color changing bulb at Lowes and linked it to my Google home app. I wanted to be able to make the lamp go from white to bright pink! Kawaii!
The Files
The files are mostly print and go however I do recommend cutting them in half for the wings, crown and handle top and bottom. Then gluing them together with something like Loctite’s plastic bonder. Otherwise your printer may have a hard time with the pieces. They tend to end up janky if you don’t splice these parts and that’s definitely not how you’d want your lamp to look after you work so hard on it.
Cutting them and placing them flat on the surface of the software worked the best for me. So it should look something like this before printing.
It’s important to make sure that your copying and pasting them in the right orientation and setting them so that the Z access is using the board as a natural splicing point. You’ll want to eyeball them and make sure that the sides make sense when you put them together, this could be a lot of trial and error before you’re happy with the result.
After you get the whole thing printed I recommend taking them outside and spray painting them to the desired color. I chose gold for mine as a base because I wanted it to look grown up and pretty. The accent pieces I decided to go with hot pink. And the lamp topper I used a shiny blue/pink filament along with a clear filament for the etched character pieces.
Assembling the top
This part was a bit of a process however I did talk back and forth with @subtlyfantastic to get an idea on the best route for it. For a bit of background information I am a stained glass artist. Usually stuff like this, with glass is my jam. The fact that it’s plastic was a bit hard to wrap my head around because copper foil, solder and flux definitely won’t work and would likely melt the pieces. Subtlyfantastic told me about softening filament to bond the pieces together after inserting the base pieces in the corner supports. That worked kind a little but I had a hard time getting the printed pieces to bond together. I had much better luck after assembling the base out of cardboard and using that as a guide. Just like working on a Tiffany lamp!
Once the pieces were bonded with plastic filament, Loctite plastic bonder and Glue Gun (Not my best gluing job but it worked) I was able to assemble the lamp completely.
This was the real champion of justice ~
Scaling Up?
The only thing I needed to scale up is the Harp that gets inserted into the top crown of the lamp. It looks like this,
Finished Result
After about a week of printing and testing I finally got the thing put together. The results were great.
(Excuse the mess of cords and toys, I live with gremlins. )
While it’s not perfect, for a first attempt at printing and assembling something like this I’m pretty proud of it. And you can use a regular topper if you don’t want to get crazy with the Tiffany Style Lamp
Project Page: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/home/sailor-moon-lamp-with-lithophane-tiffany-style-shade
