3D PRINTED LAMP SHADE?

Once one of our colleagues got an interesting problem to solve.

There was a floor lighting built into a driveway but unfortunately one part of the lighting broke during a renovation process. The owner contacted our colleague to help him reconstruct the broken part which was a lamp shade.

He couldn’t replace it himself as the manufacturing company was not producing the shade anymore and there was no used version of it on the market to buy either.

The structure of the lamp consists of the lamp itself, a glass shade and a metal frame. The glass shade covers the lamp and the metal frame’s purpose is to protect the glass shade from breaking.

The owner only had one original sample of the glass shade which he could take a few photos of before it was unluckily destroyed too during a delivery process.

Thus the mission was clear, to recreate the broken glass shade only from a few photos, the shape of the metal frame and some specifications that could be found on the internet.

Our colleague put one week of hard work into the task and in the end he managed to reconstruct the shade. He took the dimensions off the metal frame with rulers, calipers and tried to guess the shape of the shade from the pictures.

The last step of the process was to print the reconstructed lamp shade and see if it fits correctly to the metal frame or not.

The object was printed with the Craftbot Flow XL 3D printer. It was made from PETG filament and it took approximately 6 hours to print it.

I believe the pictures speak for themselves!

The mission was successfully accomplished and the owner was very grateful for our cooperation.

The project was useful to execute not only to help the owner of the broken lamp but also to have a 3D design of the lamp shade in the future if it was needed. With the reconstructed design the shade could be reprinted as many times as requested.

Moreover, it is worth considering for manufacturers to provide STL files for the items they do not produce anymore. In this way they could still serve their customers and satisfies their needs at the maximum as they could print the missing spare parts for themselves at home with the help of a 3D printer.