The Ballpoint Pen of Our Age: Building a Fully 3D Printed Home Lab

3D printing is a creative enterprise at heart: the new ballpoint pen for the common man. Just as the biro once put writing in every pocket, the desktop printer is putting manufacturing on every desk.

So have we realised its full potential? I'd argue we haven't even started.

The numbers show a technology still in its infancy. Shipments of entry-level 3D printers rose 47% year-on-year in the final quarter of 2025¹, and the installed base of consumer machines is projected to grow from 15.8 million units in 2024 to 40.4 million by 2029². Tens of millions of people will soon have a small factory sitting next to their router. The real question is what they choose to make with it.

My own answer started with play. Through oesimracing.com, I began designing 3D printed solutions to immerse myself more deeply in the games I love. Along the way I realised how far the barriers to entry for electronics projects have fallen over the past twenty years. Electronics labs are now a common sight in teenage bedrooms: a £10 soldering iron, a £150 Bambu Lab A1 Mini, a microcontroller like the Raspberry Pi Pico or an Arduino for a few pounds more. Hardware that once needed a university workshop now fits on a desk and costs less than a new phone.

That openness has not reached biology. We have quietly accepted that serious science comes with a price tag of thousands for specialist equipment, and for professional research that has its reasons. But what about the hobbyists and the tinkerers, the curious people who don't need professional-grade calibration and certainty, and who simply want to do biology rather than read about it?

The evidence says the price tag isn't a law of nature. Researchers in the open-hardware movement have shown that combining open-source lab techniques with 3D printing can cut the cost of scientific equipment by 90–99%³. One of that movement's founding moments came when a professor priced a lab jack at $1,000, a device whose only job is to move things up and down, and his team printed a working replica for about five dollars⁴. If that's possible for a lab jack, what about the rest of the lab?

That is why I have set out on a new project: a fully 3D printed home lab.

Sources

• 1. CONTEXT, “Quarterly Industrial 3D Printer Shipments Rebound Amid Continued Record-Breaking Entry-Level Growth” (April 2026)
• 2. China Insights Consultancy (CIC) projections, as reported by Tiger Brokers
• 3. Joshua Pearce, “3D Printing in the Next Five Years”, 3D Printing Industry
• 4. “Equip your lab for less – 3D print your equipment”, LabOnline (2013)