3D pens for serious fabrication

I have become interested in freehand 3D printing, i.e. using 3D pens for serious fabrication and repair of one-off small plastic items.
It appears that few if any 3D pen manufacturers are aware that their products might be used as a tool instead of a toy. Therefore they do not build in tool use ruggedness and quality. It may be that the only way to get the 3D pen tool that I want would be to build it.
Is there any interest here on the forum in discussing design and construction of such a tool? If not, could anyone suggest other fora or communities which might be more appropriate?
Thank you,
Jeff

I was curious about your idea. How do you plan to use a 3D pen to make and repair objects? To manufacture there is no precision, and to repair, lack of adhesion of the thermoplastics. For this purpose, a resin dispenser would be much more useful.
I may be wrong, but I also do not see another use for 3D pens other than fun.

They are toys!

They are hot glue guns

Your hand can precisely position and lay up plastic in thin air?
Right?

Build a extruder / hotend with a handle

Find a way to cool hot filament in air quickly.

perhaps an art sculpture project.

You could become Michaelangelo of PLA is 20 30 years!

I was given one for Christmas and used it to fill in a gap in a printed part where I'd been careless with the slicing when using a big nozzle and 1.5mm extrusion width. It saved me a repeat on a 4 hour print with 250g of filament in it, so I was quite happy. The quality of the hand repair was obviously different to the printed surface, so this probably isn't much use for bare decorative parts, but for functional parts or parts that are going to be post-processed it seems quite workable. You can use it to join parts, but I suspect that gluing is easier and more functional in most cases.

Using the pen as intended for free hand doodling is quite amusing too

... Orbi-tech ( [orbi-tech.com] ) is using some bigger types of "hot glue guns" as tool since some ten years now - no known "plastic Micelangelos" until now, but small injection-moulds ( [www.orbi-tech.de] ) can be handy too

---

Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

I think if you wanted to use a pen for making something serious you would need to be OCD or Autistic.

Has anyone tried pulling the extruder from a Bowden printer and using it as a high-performance pen?

I just ordered a cheap one on Aliexpress to see how it is made and what you can do with it.
Will be an interesting little project

Lykle