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When I started making 3D-printed fountain pens, initially for myself, I was intent on making a pen with a piston filling system. A noble objective. After all, piston filling systems are the acme of filling systems, aren’t they? The most expensive models from famous pen companies such as Pilot, Pelikan and Montblanc always have piston fillers. Surely that’s because they are better.

Well, piston filling systems are better than the bladders in my vintage Parker English Duofolds and Sheaffer Imperials. At least they’re better in some ways. Somehow. Pistons do not perish with age (or do they?), and they are not adversely affected by ‘difficult’ or ‘dangerous’ inks. Those things are either true or mostly true. However, in my opinion the push-button filling of the older of my Duofolds is less fiddly than a piston and the ‘Touchdown’ system of the Sheaffer is pretty cool. Probably the piston filler pens are more easily cleaned for ink colour changes, but they are certainly not superior in all ways.

I eventually gave up on the idea of making a 3D-printed piston filler because I was unable to make the inside of the ink cylinder smooth enough for a piston to seal (see my previous blog in praise of layer lines). I then fiddled around with printing ink bladders of various designs out of flexible TPE filament. They worked variably well but I never got them into a pen, for a variety of reasons that don’t matter here. (I may return to the printed bladder for a future series of pens. We’ll see.) 

It turns out that, for me, cartridge converters are an optimal ink filling system. Optimal for me as a pen maker in the sense that it is easy for me to pair a converter with a converter-ready nib unit and get a pen that fills, empties, and writes reliably. And optimal for me as a pen user because cartridge converters facilitate ink changes. Changes of ink colour.

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Coloured inks: the secret to fountain pen joy!

When I first used a fountain pen (don’t ask how long ago that was—I was in primary school) No-one I knew ever thought much about ink as we all used blue ink. I might have been forgiven if I had spelled the word ink with a Q because my dad was a Parker man (I wish I knew where his 51 went…) and so our house used Quink blue-black.

It turns out that whereas a fountain pen with one ink is a tool for writing, a fountain pen with its choice of many colours is a joy!

I have a collection of inks including the old Quink blue-black from my dad; that box is not empty. Most come from Australian ink makers. I’ve just counted the bottles and I’m a little embarrassed but the numbers. Fouteen from Van Dieman’s Ink, eight from Blackstone, a handful of sample vials from Robert Oster, but I also have inks from Waterman, Fountain Pen Revolution and Diamine. That’s a lot of ink, but I’m sure that I’ll buy more before too long. (Please don’t tell my family!)

With the large capacity of a piston filler I would have to hand write a novel each month to get more than a couple of inks into rotation, and that’s where cartridge converter comes into its own. The Standard International converters that I use hold just on 0.8ml if you get all the air out. It’s not difficult to write one dry, particularly with a broad and wet nib. It’s also easy to get a partial fill into the cartridge so that ink changes can be even more frequent. Lovely. 

And to top it off, a cartridge converter is relatively easy to clean. If the ink is not readily rinsed out with a couple of fills and empties of the pen you can be remove the cartridge converter from the nib unit to allow flushing of the nib and feed under the tap or with a bulb. The converter can be flushed easily with a syringe and blunt needle and then you’re good to fill with the new ink in just a minute or two. Compare that to the sometimes tedious precess of cleaning out an ink bladder or fixed piston and I think you’ll see what I mean about the optimality of the cartridge converter.

All in all I am happy to make, use, and sell pens that come equipped with the ‘lowly’ cartridge converter. 

The sparkle and glitter and gleam of platypus pens comes from the shininess of the plastic used and the interplay of light and their layer lines.

So many fountain pens have a smooth polished surface that it is surely the default surface. Platypus 3D printed pens come in surface patterns that are much more intricate and interesting than the default. A smooth finish _could_ be achieved by sanding and polishing away the layer lines, by filling the lines, or with some types of plastic by solvent smoothing. However, why fight against the layer by layer nature of 3D printing with complicated post-print processing when a far better result is had by taking advantage of it?

…and that’s not all!

The layers of a 3D-printed fountain pen also hide fingerprints—something that’s quite useful in an object that is held in the hand during use!—as well as scratches. Not that a Platypus pen is easily scratched: the PLA they are made from is harder than, for example, ABS plastic and so they are naturally scratch resistant.

There’s a long answer and a short answer to that question. The short answer is that by 3D printing fountain pens I am able to combine two of my hobbies: 3D printing and fountain pens! 

The longer answer is, I hope, more interesting. By 3D printing my pens I am able to make a product that is beautiful, functional, and interesting. 

I suppose that I might be able to achieve at least a coupe of those virtues when making fountain pens by other methods, in particular by turning acrylic or wood in a lathe. (I’d love to have a lathe…). However, I think that no matter how beautiful and functional a pen I could make that way it would be difficult for me to achieve ‘interesting’. After all, there are so many beautiful and functional fountain pens already available from large and small pen makers that my efforts would be largely superfluous.

What makes a 3D printed pen interesting?

Well, that depends on who we might be thinking about. Many people find 3D printing and 3D printed objects interesting simply because they don’t often see them. (I’ve been exploiting that by giving 3D printed gifts to friends and family. Please don’t tell them!) That probably counts here because very few fountain pens are 3D printed. If you are ‘into’ fountain pens then a 3D printed fountain pen is intersting, and if you are ‘into’ 3D printing then a fountain pen is an interesting thing to print.

There’s another important way that 3D printing allows the manufacture pens of more than usual interest: 3D printing allows the pens to be intricate in ways that are not easily (or cheaply) achieved with other manufacturing methods. Consider the surface texture of my Pattern 3 pens. Is that not interesting?

The layer by layer nature of the 3D printing process allows repeating spaces in the surfaces of varying depth and widths that give the surface an apparent depth and hand-feel that is unlike all others. Even completely the completely uniform layers of the grip sections get a peculiar sheen from the 3D printed layer lines.

Why 3D print fountain pens? Look at the results and you will see.

Other 3D printed fountain pens

My pens are by no means the first to be 3D printed. The pen company Additive specialises in 3D printed fountain pens that are very different from mine in looks and in the construction methods used. Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I will suggest that the Additive pens achieve only two of the three virtues mentioned above. Check them out here.

I have seen a few high-end ornate metal 3D printed fountain pens that achieve amazing levels of intricacy… at amazing prices. For example, see the pen reviewed here.

Finally, if you have a 3D printer and you would like to print your own pens then look at this project on Thingiverse for an open-source fountain pen.

Types of 3D printers

There are two main categories of 3D printers for home users: FDM and SLA. Those acronyms might not tell you anything, and their expansions are probably just as arcane. FDM stands for fused deposition manufacturing and SLA is stereolithography. (Why is it not just SL? I don’t know.) But don’t worry about “deposition” and “lithography” just know that an FMD printer melts a rod of plastic and extrudes it as a fine stream into a pattern or shape and an SLA printer projects an image onto a light-setting resin to make it set into a shape. Both types make a 3D object one thin layer atop another.

SLA printers offer high resolution and so can make highly detailed prints. They are the printer of choice for people who make miniature figurines, for example, where the high resolution enables the production of wonderfully detailed objects. See here for examples. Usually SLA printers can only make relatively small objects, but fountain pens are made of small objects and so that limitation is not important. What’s more important is the types of plastic that can be printed by SLA.

SLA printers have to use photopolymerising resins which are basically liquid acrylics or epoxies (and maybe others too—I’m not an expert on SLA). I may be asking for trouble here, but judging from a DuckDuckGo image search, the number of different resin types and colours is tiny compared to the range of plastic types and colours for FDM printers. And for my purposes, the limited palette of plastics of SLA printers is a problem and so I use an FDM printer.

PLA is made from plant-derived starch and so it’s a ‘bio-plastic’ and is, allegedly, compostable and biodegradable. In practice PLA does not break down even after years of exposure outside. The compostability refers to high temperature industrial composting and so there is probably no environmental benefit to the PLA beyond it being made from plant-derived starch rather than fossil oil.

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3D printing rockets and houses

Yep, rockets. Space rockets.

There are three important types of 3D printers that I have not yet mentioned, powdered bed fusion, wire welding, and concrete extrusion.

Powdered bed printers work by fusing together a layer of fine powder which is then covered by another fine layer of powder to be fused, and so on. How the powder is fused depends on the nature of the powder. Some home experimenters made 3D printers that fused baking powder or talcum powder with super glue fired out of an inkjet printer nozzle, but industrial powdered bed printers can use metal powders and they are fused (sintered) by heating with high power lasers.  3D printing can make parts that have shaped and voids that would be difficult or even impossible to form using conventional machining from chunks of metal, and so 3D printing has great potential for aerospace components such as jet engine parts. In fact, you might already have flown in a plane powered by engines with 3D printed parts.

Rocket parts have been made with powdered bed fusion printers, but at least one company is making rockets virtually ENTIRELY with 3D printers. They are using a welding-like 3D printing method that fuses metallic wire in a manner quite similar to the way that FDM printers fuse plastic filaments.

At least one bridge has been made using fused wire 3D printing, and 3D printed concrete is being touted as a material for rapid production of cheap and safe housing on earth, and on other planets!

Even though those uses of 3D printing might sound exciting, the most important use of 3D printing is the production of fountain pens!