Dog trophy lamp by Ecohunt

Five years ago, Bence Koós started the Ecohunt brand as a hobby during his interior design studies. His low-poly paper zoo located in Budapest, Hungary, soon grew to be a full-time job. You can find his work appear in restaurants, homes, offices, commercials, photo works, and as a wedding or other event decorations.

His latest significant work is the dog trophy lamp, made for Papírkutya, which means Paperdog in Hungarian. It’s a memorial trophy for the owners’ dog, named Bodza which means elderberry in Hungarian.

“In late September, the owner of Papírkutya contacted me, that they want a trade-sign for their new restaurant’s wall. At that time, I was experimenting with PLA Crystal Clear because I wanted to create unique trophy lamps from long ago. In those experiments, I’ve created a fox head with a black surface and glowing edges that my client really liked, so we finalized the design with this style,” Bence tells us.

“While I usually work with paper, when I 3D print, my go-to material is PLA. A huge advantage of the Fillamentum PLA Extrafill series is the wide range of colors corresponding to the RAL color system. When I work with clients, we can operate with existing color codes. Some clients like vivid colors, others like the pastel ones, and all of them can be found in the PLA Extrafill palette,” says Bence.

As the experimentation was with smaller sizes that could be printed in one piece, the final lamp had to be 50cm wide and 60cm tall so different approach was needed. “My idea was to print only the glowing edges and fill the gaps with the laser-cut cardstock triangles. This way the print would be faster and consume less material. I divided the trophy’s frame to elements that fit into the printing volume, and the printing has begun,” Bence explains.

Preparation and planning are crucial in bigger projects. To check if everything would easily fall in place. Bence has printed a simple pyramid to test the technique he has chosen. It was a perfect fit, so from there, the final printing could be started. Most of the printed parts and settings were fine-tuned in advance. However, a few hiccups couldn’t be avoided, but that’s nothing a little bit of sanding couldn’t fix.

“I am absolutely happy with how it turned out, and so was the clients and their customers too. I feared that the light would glow differently at the glued joints, but it became an entirely homogeneous lighting surface,” says Bence with joy.

The whole lamp frame took 132 hours to print on a 0,3 mm layer height and consumed 1.5 kg of PLA Crystal Clear. The whole building process took a full week of 12-16 hours of daily work. The building process included designing the frame, dividing, modeling, slicing, detaching supports after printing, sanding the joints, sandblasting the surfaces for diffuse glowing, frame assembling, laser cutting the filling triangles, painting them, attaching them and finally installing the finished lamp.

The continuous experimentation with different materials and technologies enables him to create various uses for his designs ranging from small jewelry to huge festival decorations. Teaming up with different co-designers and co-creators, they can take the final artworks to a higher level.

As a kid, Bence often used to play with LEGO, with the dream of designing his own lego bricks. When he started to work at Limes Model, an architectural studio creating scale models and accessories, he felt like anything can be 3D printed, not just lego bricks.

“I was always interested in 3D printing, reading a long while FreeDee’s articles about the topic. They are the official distributors of Fillamentum in Hungary. When we started to use 3D printing at Limes Model, we bought the machines and materials from them. We tried several brands’ several materials, but this brand became the best choice for us. As I started my own business last year, I kept working with Fillamentum filaments. It has a wide color palette, the quality of the filament is perfect, I like the design of the spools, the packaging is well designed and I really love the small stickers!!!” Bence tells us.

Printed with:
PLA Crystal Clear

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