I broke the world’s smallest 3D printing Pen

Things were going so smoothly. My LIX 3D Printing pen was sucking in reeds of filament and spitting out hot, soft-ish material from the tip. I was gamely trying to master 3D printing with the thin, metal device. So far, I’d managed something approximating a shoe, a face and a pair of triangles. None of it looked good, but I was improving.

Then it stopped working.

Let’s back this up a bit. It had been almost two years since I’d first written about LIX, an ultra-slim 3D printing pen that worked much like traditional 3D printers, extruding PLA or ABS material through a super-heated tip. However, instead of a computer guiding the output, your own unsteady hand could do the grunt work. Read more...