Despite doing what has seemed to me like a lot of 3D printing over the past year, I’ve only managed to use up one reel. Some of that is because that I have eschewed printing trinkets and I have also chosen to design many of the things I have run off from scratch. The design process probably accounts for the majority of the hours I have put into my new hobby.

I am getting to a point though where I’ve got another two or three rolls into the region where I can only print small items with them if I want to avoid mid-item colour changes. I’ve been thinking about what to do with the small lengths of filament that will be left and I spent some time this week looking into 3D filament pens. These are manually operated devices for extruding molten plastic and I thought they might be a way of making small repairs or one-off components with complex curves.

However, at the moment they are a bit pricier than I expected and reviews left me wondering if they would have the reliability and functionality I wanted. I’ll probably stick with adding the last bits of the filament rolls to my collection off waste plastic for eventual use as ballast in larger projects.