Maker Faire Bay Area 2023
Freehand Fabricator: An industrial-grade 3D pen.
Home: California, United States
The Freehand Fabricator is what you would get if a 3D printer and a MIG welder had a baby. It is a high-temperature, high-flow 3D printer hot end with a comfortable handle and spool-fed extruder base station. People who have used '3D pens' know how slow they are, and how quickly they break. This is the solution those makers have been waiting for: the Freehand Fabricator is capable of extruding engineering-grade plastics and is more than twice as fast as existing solutions. The project is in the late prototyping stage at the moment and will be launched on Kickstarter in the coming months. We are currently looking for people to play with the prototypes and tell us what they think!
Additional Project Photos
Maker
Timothy Keller
I'm an inventor and a serial entrepreneur. I run a makerspace called Inventopia which hosts a couple dozen science-based startups in Davis CA, and I mostly support myself as a prototyping consultant with local startups. Last year I started working
What Inspired You to Make This?
I bought a 3D pen for my son. And discovered that it had some very useful applications, fixing things, and creating creating things that would be very hard to 3D model and print. But that pen was SLOW, and frustrating, and then it BROKE. I bought another one, labeled 'pro' and it too was slow and then IT broke… I decided that the world needed a 'good' version of a handheld 3D printer, one that was faster, could handle a wider range of filaments, and was reliable / repairable.
