Customer Projects

Golden Kiwi Neon LED Shape

By: James

Using some 6mm Faux Neon LED Strip and a handy 3d printer I made this simple outline of Golden Kiwi.

It's a Kiwi worth it's weight in gold.

Yeah nothing much to it, but it turned out quite well I thought.

Printing

Best printed at no more than 0.3mm layer height, print lying flat and you won't need any support. Easy peasy. I printed witha 1.0mm nozzle for this big one and the whole thing took about an hour to print, but it's sized so you should be able to use any of the common 0.2mm, 0.4mm, 0.6mm or 0.8mm nozzle sizes without any issue.

The STL includes all the shapes arranged to fit onto most beds as a single print.

Assembly

Use superglue and baking soda to join the pieces into the Kiwi shape (for those who don't know, dip the ends into baking soda push them togethor, and let a drop of superglue fall onto the seam, the baking soda and superglue react to make a strong joint, you can also put a little more baking soda on the sides of the joint and drop superglue onto it for some extra strength if you need).

Stick down the LED strip, I used a bamboo skewer to help do this, you can sort of bvend and fold the strip on top of itself to force it around corners, it doesn't have to be perfectly centered, far from it. The adhesive tape backing sticks very well to PLA.

It's probably easier to solder wires onto the led strip before you put it in, I did it afte and it was a bit awkward. For the beak I jumped the wires from a couple of the pads ont he main strip onto the one of the beak strips, and from the other end of that beak strip to the end of the other beak strip.

I used 30AWG silicone wire and this fits nicely in the space under the silicone.

Finally just stuff the silicone in place, cut the beak bits as best you can to fit nicely, cutting an angle off both bits seemed to be best.