3D printable table lamp — design your bedside lamp free

Intensity

100%

Choose a starting point

Bubbles

Height: 150 mm

Max width: 150 mm

Base opening: 70 mm

It must cover the socket kit: measure its base and add 10 mm.

Ribs: 52

Depth: 3.5%

Twist: 0°

Wall: 1.6 mm

Cable notch

Use LED bulbs only: an incandescent or halogen bulb deforms PLA. If the socket runs warm, print in PETG.

What this tool does

Stacked-bubble silhouette (1, 2 or 3) with up to 64 fine ribs — the printed Nordic lamp aesthetic.

Realistic lit preview: translucent material with a warm light inside and a filament color picker.

A cable notch in the resting rim: the lamp sits flat on the table with the cord exiting at the back.

A custom base opening that covers any corded socket kit. Everything generates in your browser.

How it works

Pick the silhouette

Choose one, two or three sections. Adjust height and width, or use Surprise me to explore another combination.

See it lit

Switch the preview on and try filament colors — what you see is translucent PLA with a warm LED inside.

Print and set it down

No supports, thin wall, translucent filament. It rests over the lamp kit with the cord through the notch.

Frequently asked questions

What do I need besides the print?

A lamp holder kit with cable and switch — the same one salt lamps come with, available at any hardware shop or online for very little — and an LED bulb. Nothing else. The table lamp ilove3d generates sits on top covering the kit, with no threads, no glue and no screws: the base comes out open at exactly the right size for the holder to fit inside and stay hidden, and the weight of the printed body keeps it in place. That design decision is deliberate, because any fixing system would force you to buy specific hardware or to print tolerances that vary between printers. If your kit is larger than usual, measure its diameter before printing and adjust the base diameter, which is an editable parameter in the tool. And if you would rather buy nothing, any old lamp with an E27 holder works: take it apart, discard the original shade and reuse the base and cable.

What is the rim notch for?

For the cable. Without that notch the lamp would sit on top of the cable coming out of the holder and rock, besides pressing a mark into the cable with the weight of the piece. The notch is an 18 by 7 millimetre passage in the rear edge, enough for a standard kit cable, while the rest of the perimeter seats flat on the table. A detail of how it is built: the edge is not cut with a boolean operation but DISPLACED upward in that region, column by column, which keeps the piece a closed solid. Cutting would have left a hole in the mesh and the slicer would have complained. The ilove3d table lamp generator verifies that watertightness on every geometry it produces. If your cable is thicker than standard, measure it and widen the passage before printing, because widening it afterwards means filing by hand.

Is the lit preview faithful to reality?

It is an honest physical simulation rather than a flattering drawing: translucent material with real light transmission and a warm source placed where the bulb will sit, computed on the exact geometry you are going to print. The scene works in metres so that light falloff follows the inverse square law, which is what makes the gradient look believable. That said, the real result depends on the filament, and that is where the margin of error lives: natural or translucent PLA comes fairly close to what the preview shows, while opaque filaments block considerably more light than it simulates. The preview in the ilove3d table lamp generator includes swatches of typical filament colours precisely to narrow that difference before you print. It pays to look at it alternating light off and light on: judge the form unlit and the light effect lit, since they mislead each other.

Which filament glows like that?

Natural PLA, without pigment, gives the best result: with a 1.6 millimetre wall it passes a warm, even light and the layer lines disappear into the gradient instead of standing out. Coloured translucents — amber, pearl white, bottle green — also work beautifully and tint the light pleasantly. What does not work are opaque and heavily pigmented filaments, which turn the lamp into a dark silhouette with one bright point at the top. On the bulb, a warm filament LED at around 2700 K produces the effect you see in the photos: cool 6000 K LEDs give a bluish light that ruins the feel of natural PLA entirely. A cheap trick: if you already own opaque filament and would rather not buy more, print with a thinner wall and more lobes, which offsets some of the opacity.

Will it melt from the bulb?

With an LED there is no risk at all: a 4 to 10 watt LED barely warms the air around it, and PLA, which begins softening near 60 degrees Celsius, never comes close. What must NEVER go inside a printed shade are incandescent or halogen bulbs: those concentrate real heat, comfortably exceed that threshold, and can deform the piece within minutes. That is why the ilove3d table lamp generator states it in the interface and not only here. If your holder feels warm to the touch after a while, or if the lamp will stay on for many hours at a stretch, print in PETG, which tolerates roughly twenty degrees more than PLA does. It applies to the surroundings too: a lamp enclosed in a cabinet with no ventilation builds up more heat than one in open air with the same bulb.

How long does it take to print?

With a 1.6 millimetre wall and no infill — the piece is all wall, so infill contributes nothing — a 150 millimetre lamp comes in around four to six hours depending on your printer and layer height. That is less than people usually estimate, because a thin-walled hollow piece contains far less material than its outer volume suggests. The lobes add no time: they are part of the same perimeter the printer is already tracing, so a heavily sculpted lamp takes practically as long as a smooth one. What does change the time noticeably is total height and layer height, and there it is worth not going below 0.2 millimetres unless you are after a particular finish. If you are printing several, keep each batch at one height: changing the height between pieces means re-slicing every time, which adds up.

How does 'describe it in words' work?

Choose a starting design and adjust height, width, base opening, ribs and twist. The preview updates to match your settings. Download once the model has finished updating.

Question of the month

Which printer do you use?

Table lamps

What this tool does

How it works

Pick the silhouette

See it lit

Print and set it down