Fixing Veronica’s lights

For the second class challenge, the “fix-it” challenge, my partner Sam and I fixed Veronica’s broken string of lights. The lights are white christmas lights with transparent stars around each bulb. One of the stars fell off leaving that bulb exposed. Our challenge was to print a new star to replace the one that fell off.

We imported a star shape into tinkercad and scaled it to the correct dimensions. The star that we imported had the same type of curves on the top,  however the stars on the lights have the curves on the top and bottom, so we copied the star and made a mirror image facing downwards.

We cut a hole running from the top to the bottom of the star for the cord to run through, and a larger area in the center for the actual bulb to sit in.

Originally we thought we could slip the wire into the hole while printing was happening (like with the quarter trap), however it was too tight of a fit and we had to pause the print to put it in. We ran into trouble at this point because the wire kept moving and affecting how the top half of the star was printing.

-Laura Grace Ailor