Spooky 3D Printed Pumpkin - Happy Halloween from the team at Filabot!

The end of October is upon us, and all of us here at Filabot (and Massive Dimension) would like to wish you a very happy (and spooky) Halloween! Hopefully, you have a big pile of candy and a most excellent costume to celebrate the 31st with- have you carved any pumpkins? 

Rather than break out the carving knives, we thought we would put our 3D printers to use and see if we couldn’t print a suitable spooky pumpkin! We ended up pulling a nice looking model from Thingiverse, “Vampire Pumpkin New” by user justinds89 (thanks Justin!), sliced it in Cura, and had our file ready to go. 

Lucky for us, the Massive Dimension branding is black and orange, so most of our 3D printed parts end up being those colors. There was a decent amount of failed prints and rapid prototyping iterations stored in a container that we decided to grind up to make our pumpkins. 

Rather than just go pure orange we let some other random colored prints into the blend, thinking it might create some nice variegated hues in the pumpkin to make it more “organic”. After running the plastic through the grinder, we mixed the resultant granules with clear virgin LX175, a bio-based PLA. We wanted to achieve a semi-transparent print wall so we could try to light it from within!

Once the print was finished we simply drilled a hole large enough in the base to pop a light bulb on a cord through and plugged it in! Ideally, some sort of LED light source with a battery pack would be preferable, so you could place it outside unhindered by power cords. Maybe set it on a repeating timer so it would be hidden in the dark then suddenly come on as soon trick or treaters walked past… 

Have you utilized your 3D printers for Halloween decorations, costumes, etc? Let us know in the comments!

Below are some photos from the experiments:

1. Failed prints and iterations

2. Resultant regrind (mostly orange)

3. Regrind mixed with LX-175

4. Vampire pumpkin outdoors

5. Pumpkin lit from within