3Doodler

The 3Doodler kindly loaned to us by Maplin is a hand held filament extruder, which allows you to free-form model with ABS and PLA plastic.

Several of our members had a go with this device, it is a resonable size and weight, and can be comfortably held in the hand. It can be tricky getting started for free-air work, you have to find a surface that it will adhere to, but once the first parts are stuck you can move it around, up/down, side to side, whilst extruding plastic and build yourself a "sculpture".

Now I don't think any of us are really artistic enough, as try as we might we could not produce anything other than vaguely shaped colourful spaghetti, however where this device did prove useful for us was to decorate existing 3d prints.

You can take a traditional mono-colour 3d printed object, and with the 3doodler you can quickly and easily embellish and colour in parts of your model. for example print a white snowman, then with black filament in the 3doodler draw on some buttons, eyes, mouth etc. You can also use it to weld/glue together pieces of a model.

In summary, a most interesting gadget, but one for the more artistically gifted amongst you.