Three-dimensional printers are a big deal at the moment, with every technology company – including outfits such as Arduino, better known for lowcost educational microcontrollers – looking to stick their fingers in the pie. There’s no doubt that they’re handy devices, but they’re still prohibitively expensive; even the cheapest hobby model imported from China will set you back at least £300, and building your own 3D printer – while possible – is technical and fiddly. There’s a gap in the market, then, for an absolute entry-level device – and it’s a gap that toolmaker Velleman is looking to fill with its 3D printing pen.
It isn’t the first such device, of course – 3Doodler, from the wonderfully named WobbleWorks, hit Kickstarter back in 2013 with the exact same concept and walked away with a cool $2.3 million – minus fees, of course – for its trouble.
The overall concept of the two pens is identical: take the printing head out of a 3D printer and make it handheld, replacing all those expensive motors and controllers with cheap muscles and brainpower.
You’re then left with a bulky pen that only has a little more to it than a glue gun: a nozzle at the end heats up, while a motor – an upgrade from the squeeze-to-dispense friction mechanism of most glue guns – pushes through PLA filament, the same material used in most 3D printers.
The result is a thin stream of soft plastic that hardens as it cools, creating a physical ‘drawing’ that isn’t constrained to the usual two dimensions of a traditional pen or pencil.
If that sounds unbelievably useful then it’s time to read the results of my testing before getting out your credit card and placing an order. The real magic of a 3D printer is twofold – it can create complex objects on demand and identically each time and it can create said objects without direct human interaction. Take the extrusion head out of the printer and hold it in your hand, and you remove both these advantages.
Suddenly, you have to spend every minute of the printing process actively controlling the pen, and your pathetic meat-and-bone nature means that the end result is wobbly and inaccurate.
At least, that was my experience. I’d be the first to admit that I don’t have a great deal of artistic talent, but only part of the horror of what I created can be blamed on that. The technology behind a 3D printer simply doesn’t translate well to human use. Without the motors and controllers, the movement is inaccurate and the print is wobbly; without a heated print bed, the materials solidify when you don’t want them too – or, in many cases, stay too soft to create a structure such as the impressive scale model of the Eiffel Tower promised on the back of the packaging.
The pen’s controls, too, are clumsy. One side holds two buttons, the lower of which activates the motor to extrude the PLA filament. The speed at which the filament is extruded is controlled by a slider on the other side of the pen, but it has a hair-trigger. I found the ideal speed to be less than a fifth into the slider’s travel, and just 1mm above that mark accelerated the speed to the point where the pen was unusable. Given how you hold a pen, it was all too easy to knock the speed control – which has no locking mechanism – during use.
When a 3D printer prints objects, it does so in a complex computer-generated pattern of support structures to keep the structure upright. A human can’t easily reproduce that system: attempts to create freestanding structures, as with my wobbly cubes and pyramids, are exercises in frustration, involving lots of pausing and blowing while waiting for struts to cool enough to support their own weight, as the pen threatens to stretch the filament out of shape. Slightly more success can be had by using the pen to create more solid surfaces, but you’ll soon burn through the bundled PLA and the finished article won’t be the attractive, precise creation you imagine when the topic of 3D printing comes to mind.
What the Velleman 3D Printing Pen does have going for it is its price: at £64.79 inc VAT, it’s a fraction of the cost of a real 3D printer. The manual’s warning that it is for ‘educational use only’ rings true, however – I can’t recommend picking one up as anything other than a curiosity. If you do, and you actually manage to use it for something practical, let me know – I’d be fascinated to know the how and why!