I love fountain pens. The thing about fountain pens is finding one that matches what you want. Pens come in so many shapes and sizes. The feed determines how much ink feeds to the nib. Finding one to meet your specifications can be pricey because it might take a lot of buying before you get the right balance that you like.
With a 3D printer, some people have been creating pens to their own specifications. It’s still early days in this craft, but it will be fun to see this evolving.
Here’s a feed that’s 3D printed that creates a wetter writing experience.
I looked it up and saw one guy using an exacto knife to widen the channel on a feed. That’s dangerous business. Those feed channels are only a couple hairs’ width. One tiny cut too much and the feed is useless, making globs of ink on the page. I haven’t seen too many replacement feeds so that makes the whole pen not usable.
That’s where the 3D printed feed could come in handy.
Not me. I don’t care all that much how my pen looks. I want it to be smooth as silk gliding on the page with a wet ink flow and keeps up with a fast speed of writing. I use my fountain pens to get my thoughts to paper, the faster the better. The feel counts if it slows my writing down.
For me, if the pen looks beautiful as well, that’s a bonus, but not the main reason I get/use the pen.
Found this video on fountain pen materials interesting. The question is about the difference between resin, plastic and celluloid. As far as I can tell, resin, acrylic and plastic are all plastic. Celluloid might have some extra stuff in it. But besides metal, those are the main components of most fountain pen bodies.
Brian Goulet says that some companies like to call some plastics resin because it sounds better than any other plastic, but they’re all plastic.
If that’s true, maybe the material in 3D printing in the future will allow for the same materials used in fountain pens now.
Hopefully, there will be more readily available and recyclable bioplastics in the future. For now, metal is more recyclable. Luckily, many fountain pens can last for generations. There are only a few intentionally recyclable fountain pens I’ve seen lately.
Yeah a good pen should last - I am hoping I won’t need to replace this one I might experiment with different nibs (maybe we need a thread for that )
I’m still not fussed tbh - metals have such a variety of different uses and feel a little closer to nature for my liking. Plastics need all sorts of different chemicals. I do my best to avoid them even if recyclable (I hate that my water comes in a plastic bottle for instance!)
I took up a new hobby it’s 3d printing. I still don’t understand well, it takes me a lot of time to figure it out, but I’m not in a hurry. I bought myself an inexpensive printer with Сreality3D, for the first time, then maybe I’ll choose something more interesting.I hope I’ll start printing some cool stuff soon.
@Bruce, I watched a railway modeller make some signals on YouTube for his layout by using a 3D resin printer. I recall that you have a printer, and no doubt somewhat more advanced. But these ones can be bought for around £250-£300 ($600 ish).
Are they worth it, in your experience. What sort of useful things have you made to justify the cost of yours?
I have just bought a Flashforge Adventurer 5M Pro, it cost me $599 from Amazon but the same printer is available for about half that price just not fully enclosed and filtered.
As I tend to print at night and the printer is just outside my bedroom I got the enclosed and filtered version because it is quieter and I also intend to print in ABS which does give off fumes. If you are only going to print in PLA or PETG then the enclosure is probably unnecessary, however you can buy it separately later if you feel it is necessary.
My Flashforge Adventurer 3 has just about had it, I was going to give it to my daughter to experiment with but I cannot get any spare parts (needs a new ribbon cable) - I have had it many years, the new one is much faster, can build larger objects (see build plate in picture) and is a much improved design. Like the previous model the new one is ideal for beginners.
Thanks Bruce. I get a sense of size of it from the pliers and other bits n bobs.
I just need to think of whether I could make enough use of it to justify getting one.
The fella who made his railway signals did a ballpark calculation and to break even (based on the average cost of buying commercial signals) he’d need to make 9. As it is, he made a fair few more.
We shall see if I can think up a few things that I could make…
I think you would be surprised what you can make. There are whole sites where people upload all the files necessary to print items and I do use them myself.
Personally I enjoy designing my own things in OpenScad but that is not strictly necessary however it very satisfying to know that you can custom make a device and create it entirely in less that a day.
For example my daughter needed a mounting for a levelling device in her campervan, I knocked one up in a morning especially for her, she came back to me a few days later on behalf of friends in her 4 by 4 club wanting several more. I suppose if you advertise you could charge for such things.
More mundane things like pencil containers and various brackets are easy to knock up, I just had a quick look and there are 87 items in my OpenScad folder of things I have designed over the years (some for a one off job though) but I have never worked out the economics of it as it is just a hobby and a lot of fun.
Just as a matter of interest I looked up “model railway” in Thingiverse and there are pages of 3D printed designs - don’t forget this is just one of many such sites too.
I might experiment with different nibs (maybe we need a thread for that 
)
