Kees Kamper's PETG 3D Printed Lamps

Kees Kamper has been working on designing and developing 3D printed lamps for three years now. His blog details his findings and journey on his blog and Instagram. He developed a line of lamps by himself initially. Now he collaborates with lamp designer Gerard Schoone for his current line. 

Kees uses Slic3r for his files and 3D4Makers PETG filament for his lamps. He choose out PETG because the material is stronger and tougher than PLA and more flexible. This flexibility lets his lamp parts fit better and they are also less likely to break. He also likes the layer adhesion and the shine of the material. 

Kees has several lines of lamps from tiny desktop models to large living room filling arrays. He uses strong primary colors such as our Blue PETG filament which has a RAL 5002 color and our Red PETG which has a RAL 3020 color. 

The interesting thing about Kees' lamps is that he's invented a new way to print them. Kees came up with "infill only 3D printing." With Infill only 3D printing Kees sets the wall thickness to 0 and prints only infill. 

By printing only infill the closed smooth surface texture of his lamps is changed. Instead he gets an open patterned surface. In Slic3r he then selects from the different infill percentages and patterns to obtain the desired result per lamp. 

He varies his infill patterns using the Slic3r Rectilinear, concentric, honeycomb, Archimedean Chords, Line, Octagram Spiral and Hilbert Curve infill patterns. He then plays with the infill density of each pattern to obtain the desired result in the lamp. The thickness of the lamps and their shape have influence on this and through a process of trial and error he develops the right one per lamp. 

By having a patterned surface Kees can develop unique, "Interactions with light" through the textured structure of the lamps. This gives the light coming off the lamps "more pop" and makes them "more exciting" while letting the light "really sparkle." 

Kees is now working on a completely new line of lamps that make further use of infill only 3D printing to create more vibrant light effects. We think that this is really great cutting edge work and see a lot of possibilities here for optimizing FDM 3D printed lamps. We're proud that Kees uses our PETG and wish him and his team a lot of success.