Plastic Squirts

So I picked up a "3D Printing Pen" this week.

It's basically a handheld version of a 3D printer extruder, and in this case powered via USB C. You shove 1.75mm filament up its poop chute and it vomits out a semiliquid version of it from the other end when you press the button. This then quickly hardens and, by manipulating the pen, you can shape this plastic into a variety of different forms.

I opted for the fancy version which incorporates a display on the side. A hilariously small display.

I wanted to make sure I had some decent control of the temperature, and experimenting with that without a display didn't seem like the most productive use of my time.

Speaking of unproductive uses of my time, I decided to give it a test run by "printing" a plastic YouTube play button, mostly because they included a play button shape printed on a pack-in card with the unit and it was easy to trace over.

This did mean that the top surface of the paper came up with the plastic, since apparently ASA sticks to coated paper fairly well I guess.

But the exercise did validate that the pen works, and I'm at least vaguely capable of manipulating it.

While most people use these for creative hobby projects, my goal for this is much more utilitarian: I'm planning on using it for rebuilding portions of broken plastic in my various synth repair adventures. Since this broken plastic is most commonly ABS, getting a pen that could melt ABS (or ASA in this case) reliably was an important factor, as many cheaper models only melt PLA. This pen seems to do that job fairly well, so I'm looking forward to putting it to work.