3D Printed Quill Pen for GISHWHES 2014 Scavenger Hunt

Tags: 3D Printing, GISHWHES, Objet, Quill Pen, Stratasys

Sometimes you get strange messages on Facebook. This weekend I heard a beep and checked my phone “Can you 3D Print a Quill Pen?” Most messages involve asking me why I posted something stupid or annoying, so this one caught my attention. Turns out my friend Chelsea is taking part in the 2014 “GREATEST INTERNATIONAL SCAVENGER HUNT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN” or GISHWHES. One of the items in the scavenger hunt is to print out an ink quill pen on a 3D Printer and write “We need to buy more Toner” on a sheet of paper with the pen.

I can’t resist a challenge like that, so I told her no problem. And it worked like a charm.

This video shows the printing process:

The process we used was very straightforward:

First I went into a CAD program, SolidEdge in this case, and build a solid model of a quill pen. Not being quill pen designer I found some web sites on how to cut a pen tip from a real feather, and tried to mimic the resulting geometry:

We then wrote an STL file out and sent that to our RP team. They read that into our preparation software and separated the feathers from the stem, designating a rubber like material for the feather area for artistic purposes, and a hard white plastic for the stem and the tip.

That file was then sent to our Stratasys Objet500 Connex3 and printed in about 30 minutes.

Once it was done, we just needed to wash out the support material and it was ready to go.

The moment of truth was then here. Our intreped Scavenger Hunter took out her handy-dandy pot of India Ink and dipped the quill in, the she wrote out the requested message:

I worked like a charm, our handwriting was the biggest issue.

Wanting to see if it enhanced my artistic skills, I used it to sketch the following masterpiece: