Candle Light Band Towers

I present to you the candle light band tower, a sleek candle holder with a soft rounded look while still being dominantly with its distinctive accent bands.

A traditional one, two, three set is provided and shown in the images above, but the model can be customized to fit any kind of candle light, as long as it is LED :)

Parametric, of course!

The model is fully parametric, the four most useful parameters is highlighted before and set as favorites in the Fusion 360 file.

You can easily set the inner diameter light_diameter for your light; make it large and spacious or a precious fit for the specific lights you have, set the recess light_height to make the top of the light sit flush with the edge of the tower, or lower it down to hide the light source.

If you want to adjust the number of bands, simply change the number band_amount and watch the model update automatically.

You might want to increase the overall size too, use tower_height for that, a good increment is 20 mm based on the band spacing. (1 band = 60 mm, 2 bands = 80 mm and so on…)

Hint: You can even adjust the height of the band, offset and initial placement of the first band.

Multiple colors without AMS

If you are able to run custom macros, like with a printer running Klipper, you can with a little bit of work, print multiple colors without too much hassle.

Add G-CODE “M600” to layer in slicer
You will need to add a M600 to whenever a band starts and ends, in PrusaSlicer this is as easy as scrolling to the layer where the band starts and right clicking the orange hexagon with a plus sign, then select “Add Custom G-code”, when prompted you type “M600”

If you are using the default parameters of the model with a layer height of 0.2mm, the first band should start at layer 76 and end at layer 83. 

Custom macros
If you already have M600 defined and working, you can skip this and just enjoy printing. Otherwise there are three macros we need to add, and to avoid making this too long, I have assume you have a PAUSE that parks the tool head in the corner, FILAMENT_LOAD and FILAMENT_UNLOAD already.

The M600 macro that we trigger at the specific layer in our slicer, it first pauses the print and moves the tool head to the corner for filament swapping.

[gcode_macro M600]
description: Filament change during printing
gcode:
  SAVE_GCODE_STATE NAME=M600_state
  PAUSE ; parks the tool head in the corner
  G91
  G1 X-25 Y-25 Z20 ; moves the tool head slightly so filament still lands on the build plate
  G90
  FILAMENT_UNLOAD

After the filament is unloaded, we need to pull it out and insert the new filament, after that is inserted, we run SWAP_LOAD to load the filament.

[gcode_macro SWAP_LOAD]
gcode:
  FILAMENT_LOAD
  G0 E-5 ; retract additional filament to move out of melt zone

When the filament is loaded, we need to remove the purged filament, when the build plate is clear SWAP_RESUME can be run to resume the printing.

[gcode_macro SWAP_RESUME]
gcode:
  G0 E5 ; extract to get ready for printing
  RESTORE_GCODE_STATE NAME=M600_state
  RESUME

Print settings

In modelling this candle light tower, care was taken to make sure it was easy and fast to print, most types of filaments can be used and there are no crucial settings, but below you can find some of my recommendations.