gCreate Rocket Ship Flickering Flame Mod

thingiverse

This is a mod of the gCreate rocket ship that adds a flickering LED in the rocket plume. I added a thin tube so that thin wire could be fed though and a hole in the bottom where I inserted the guts from a 34mm diameter (this was the diameter of the base after the top was removed) flickering LED tea light that I bought from a Dollar Store. I cut off the LED and re-soldered it at the tip of the smoke, and glued the flame over the top of it. I also modified the flame so there was space for the LED and made it fit in to the engine nozzle on the rocket better than in the original. Both parts are scaled to 59% of the original size to fit the bed of my Printrbot Jr. For more details, please refer to the instructions.http://youtu.be/Yq1u0m0Ch2I Instructions Print the smoke in a white resin (or not, if that's your thing). Print the flame in a translucent filament of a suitable flame color (I had red available). If you print these without rescaling, you'll need to rescale the original spaceship and top spike to 59% and print those too. If you change the scale from mine, do bear in mind that the hole for the 34mm tea light base will also be scaled. If your tea light (after the original top is removed) is a different diameter, you'll absolutely need to rescale everything so it will fit. The hole for the wires can easily get blocked during the printing process. On mine the very top end (the cylindrical bit of the smoke piece) was completely blocked and I had to drill it out with a small drill. I then pushed some thin music wire though the hole multiple times to clear out the arcing channel. Once the channel is clear, you can feed two thin wires through until they come out the bottom where the big hole for the tea light base is. I used mag wire. Whatever wire you use, do make sure it's properly insulated so that there are no shorts! Take the top off your tea light and cut the original LED wires. Don't loose track of which terminal is which as you'll need to have it wired up with the same polarity at the end. Some permanent ink on one LED terminal and stub left on the base might be a good idea here. Solder the LED to the wire you inserted in to the smoke hole at the top where the flame will go. You should make sure you have enough spare wire to prevent your soldering iron from melting your print. Pull the wires gently down so that the LED lead stubs are as close to the top of the smoke as possible. Then solder the other end of the wires to the cut off leads on the tea light base. Again, you have to make sure you didn't reverse the polarity during this whole splicing process. Check the LED still works by switching on the tea light. Insert the tea light base in to the hole in the bottom of the smoke and tack it in place with a few dots of glue. Slide the flame over the LED and glue it to the smoke. If it doesn't down properly, you may want to shave down the smoke cylinder piece a little, or carefully drill out the bottom end of the flame. Glue your spaceship on top of the flame. A note on soldering the LED: I found it quite hard to solder to the wires on my LED. I was using tin-lead solder. I'm not sure what metal the LED wires were, but tinning the leads proved very difficult. I'm an electronics engineer with a background that includes semiconductor packaging and I have a pretty advanced knowledge of soldering metallurgy and processes, and I can't work out what was going on here. I wonder if the leads were aluminum with a very thin plating. Anyway, eventually I got everything to work and quickly glued it all together before something broke. Your tea light might be different. Mine was from a Dollar Store, as I said. It was so cheap that the electronics for the flashing are embedded in to the LED, rather than being on a separate PCB.