Crystal Lamp

So today has been printing a lot of test prints and watching most of them fail. I have been using an older spool of "natural" filament (uncolored) and it has never been the best filament, but today it has been jamming on me after about an inch in height or so (filamentoutlet.com purchased months ago form Amazon). I figured it might be jamming due to the age and general quality of the filament so I swapped it out to a brand new spool of 3D Solutech Natural I got last week (also off Amazon), price was the same, but it had a much nicer feel. Print looks way better and printed higher, but still jammed out at about over 1.5 inches. The new filament looks better though, whiter and clearer for an over all cleaner look, glad I picked this one up.

That is when I remembered I had cranked the speed setting up on my slicer to get my prints faster :p. I had been printing at 65mm/s and that is just not sustainable for a print this big. I have dialed it back down to 45mm/s and we will see how that goes.

You can see in the pic I added a base that extends towards the wall. that will slide into a slot on a wall plate I am printing now.

So far I have been printing all my tests at 15% infill and they still seem more than strong enough.

You can also see the porcelain receptacle I am using. It just barely slips into place past the new base plate, but it fits perfect once in there. I was also smart and made a hole in the base place for the cord to go through.

I have been working on this project in my spare time for over a month already when I started this log.

So far I have several mock ups, several small prototype prints, some larger key section prints and the lamp hardware and the Hue bulbs which are really cool). my biggest challenge right now is the time for printing the larger sections and the filament I have been using (causing jams, which I have previously almost never had with any size print on this printer so I am going to blame the filament for now).

Here are some pics of the small scale print, one with an 8-LED NeoPixle strip (from AdaFruit) inside it.