Aladdin Lamp / Print settings

Print settings for a 3D printed lamp

For the smoothest lamp shade, use spiral vase mode with a 0.8 mm line width. If you want a thicker wall, use solid walls with the Arachne wall generator, and set wall loops to your wall thickness divided by 0.84, rounded up. We tested both on a 250 mm tall shade in Bambu Studio.

What we tested

We exported the 250 mm tall Needle template from Aladdin Lamp and sliced it in Bambu Studio 2.7.1 for a Bambu Lab A1 with a 0.4 mm nozzle, the 0.20 mm Standard process profile and the Bambu PLA Basic filament profile. Then we read the sliced G-code to see exactly what would print. These are slicer results, not print photos.

Three things stand out:

• One wall loop on a 1.2 mm wall leaves a gap. It prints two thin lines with a 0.34 mm gap between them, so the wall is split and weak.
• Two loops with Arachne fills the wall cleanly. Classic walls fill it too, but with extra gap-fill passes that double the retractions.
• Vase mode prints the same plastic as the thin solid wall, with 3 retractions instead of 1,252. Fewer stops and starts means fewer seams, blobs and strings.

Solid walls: how many wall loops?

Our shades are hollow, so the slicer prints each wall loop on both the outside and the inside surface. One loop fills about two line widths, which is about 0.84 mm with a 0.42 mm line. So wall loops equals the wall thickness divided by 0.84, rounded up.

Also set Wall generator: Arachne, top and bottom shell layers to 0, sparse infill to 0%, and spiral vase off.

Vase mode: the smoothest option

In spiral vase mode the printer draws one continuous line that spirals up the shade. There's no seam on every layer and almost no travel between lines, so there's far less stringing.

• Turn spiral vase on and set the outer wall line width to 0.8 mm. In vase mode, the line width is the wall thickness. Use 0.6 mm for a lighter, more see-through shade.
• Set bottom shell layers to 3, top shell layers to 0, and sparse infill to 0%.
• Vase mode can't print the threaded neck of a table lamp, and it can't print supports. Use solid walls for those lamps.

Steep overhangs need supports

We sliced the Teardrop template, which flares out to 68 degrees from vertical near the bottom. Without supports, Bambu Studio flagged 121 overhang areas. Turning on tree supports fixed those areas but used about 43% more plastic, going from 37.2 m to 53.1 m. The designer warns you when a shade leans out more than about 60 degrees. The fix is either supports or a softer curve.

Other settings we recommend

• Layer height 0.2 mm, or 0.16 mm for a smoother surface.
• Outer wall speed around 60 mm/s. Slower is steadier on a tall thin wall. This is a suggestion, and we haven't measured it.
• Seam position: aligned.
• If you still see strings or blobs, dry the filament (PLA for about 8 hours at 45 C), lower the nozzle temperature by 5 C, and keep part cooling at 100% after the first layers.

The same settings in other slicers

Every export from Aladdin Lamp includes a text file with the exact numbers for your lamp, so you don't have to work them out yourself.