3d printer pens

[Dan Dubeau]

Just a psa, My wife bought my Son one of these pens for Christmas. When she asked me, I thought they were a bit of a gimmick. She bought it anyway lol. I just now had a chance to use it, and actually think it could be a useful supplement tool for a 3dprinter. Possibly a repair tool too. It supposedly does abs also, but so far I've only tried PLA. I'm curious as to how fresh extruded ABS will bond to ABS molded parts.......Preheat might be needed, but even still, this could be very handy.

There's a bit of a knack to it, and IMO the plastic extrudes a bit too fast even at the slowest speed, so you best have a travel plan before you click, but for anyone looking to spend some money on a new tool/toy for absolutely no reason, give this one one a try......

 

[Dan Dubeau]

He just popped out of his room to show me this. Ya, it's rough, but that's a 12 year old with maybe 10 minutes of seat time with it.......

I'm going to play around with it to see how it sticks to existing prints, or molded parts.

 

[Dan Dubeau]

Interesting experiment. I grabbed an old Putter head prototype print in PLA and some blue PLA provided with the kit. Could get them to adhere enough to build off, but didn't take much to pry it off. I even ran the nozzle down into the old print to melt it a bit and had the same result. Wondering if it was a temperature problem, or otherwise I printed a big square blob with the new PLA, then waited for it to cool and printed on top of it, and it stuck to itself just fine. Could be the difference in material, or something else at play like aging of the old print (~2 years old now). I'm all out of that Yellow I used for the print, so I can't try that material. Will have to fire the printer up tomorrow and give it a fresh new try.

I think I might have a roll of ABS to try somewhere too, but not sure where it might be. A bunch of that stuff is buried in the basement, and I'm really not that motivated to go digging for it right now.

I'm trying to think of a situation where that level of adhesion might be beneficial for what I use my printers for, and the only thing I can think of is to bond a printed pattern to a matchplate, or maybe for a split pattern to release. Adding extra fillet filler? Maybe it might be handy for building up missing material on something to replicate, but there are easier existing ways to do that.

It's too neat of a toy to give up trying to find a practical use for yet lol. Son is having fun with it though. I guess that's fine, seeing as it was for him anyway......

 

[Susquatch]

My wife got one of those for my daughters boy. She didn't ask me about it. Just bought it. It's a lot like Dan's, but it's a much smaller pen. It works pretty good if you ask me.