I really like thingiverse.com/thing:7820# it's an elegant solution to the spool management problem. It's cool the way that it attaches to the top of the machine, taking up a minimum of space.

Sometimes though, the filament has to move at an awkward angle, so I designed this additional bracket to tilt the spool and give the filament an easier time.

I needed to fix my filament tube to the driveblock.
This thing snaps right on the driveblock and your tube will be fixed!

Yes, yet another filament spool hanging device.

I realized if I attached the spool to the underside of the small wire rack shelf I have next to my printer for my notebook that I could put tools and other things on the space underneath it.

This should work for most types of wire rack shelving. This is set for a 90 degree hanging angle on a shelf 14" (356cm) wide. If your shelf is smaller or larger you might want to edit the .step files and change the angle of the rods. (Sorry, i'm not an openscad kind of thinker, heh)

I also wanted a way to easily change spools (I keep my spares bagged up so they do not absorb Seattle moisture.) So the spool "axle" just sits in the sockets which allows it to be easily interchanged with my other spools. The outside nuts on the spool rod are not tightened down, but rather I have 2 nuts on the ends of the rod acting as a cap.

I really like the design of a top mounted spool that rides on bearings, such as my Prusa-Top Spool Mount thingiverse.com/thing:16046 which was adapted from the MendelMax Spool Mount thingiverse.com/thing:13329 But after finishing my first spool, I faced a dilemna. Either:
1. Continue to buy a new spool for every new filament batch, or
2. Re-wind my empty spools with fresh filament.

Buying a new spool every time not only costs extra, but I felt it would be quite wasteful, and BEING WASTEFUL IS FOR JERKS!

Then I tried to re-wind a spool by hand. That turned into a tangled, frustrating mess very fast. I quickly realized that WINDING SPOOLS IS FOR CHUMPS!

Being neither chump nor jerk, I devised a third option: a spool with a removable face, so that a coil of fresh filament could just be loaded on, and then reassembled. The printed parts along with some nuts and threaded rod help hold the split spool together.

Parametric python scripts included for use with FreeCAD.

Updated with a symmetric 3 "spoke" design to avoid pinching spool on one side. After testing this, the parallel-ness of my spool faces was improved and I decided to remove the old models with only one "spoke".

The diameter was too small for me, so I designed this extension.

I likes that design of Wildseyed Spool Feeder but i don't want to waste plastic for the big Vertex feet. Also i made some feet for this design :)

this is a mount designed for Prusa based machines. It allows for top mounting of filament spools. This particular model works with Ultimachine and 3D printerstuff spools up to 5lb.

This is the filament guide that we use on all our MakerBot 3D printers at all our TechShop locations.

This filament guide is easy to print, fits well within the build envelope of the Thing-O-Matic (it won't quite fit in the Cupcake's build envelope through), doesn't warp when printed, and uses a small amount of plastic.

It provides trouble-free filament feeding, and bolts to the top of your MakerBot into existing holes with just two machine screws.

This filament guide is designed to be used with the bolt-on spool holder mounted on the top of your MakerBot. We mount our spool holder on top of the MakerBot at the front right corner, and we mount the filament guide in the holes on the top of the MakerBot in the front center.

The STL file can be downloaded from this post, as well as the editable Autodesk Inventor IPT file.

Did you know that Autodesk deeply supports the Maker Movement? You can download Autodesk Inventor for free if you are a student or educator, unemployed, or a veteran of the US military. Please see this MakerBot blog entry for information: makerbot.com/blog/2011/10/28/awesome-autodesk/

You can also use the entire Autodesk Inventor suite of software on high-end graphics workstations for free as a TechShop member at any TechShop location. See techshop.com to learn how to join TechShop, and find a location near you.

This fiament guide was designed Jim Newton, the founder of TechShop, using Autodesk Inventor 2012 running on a MacBook Pro 17 through Parallels.

This is a filament dust remover in cylindrical form. It can be attached anywhere on the filament. On top of the extruder or before your filament guide, etc.

I liked the eMaker style feet on their version of the Huxley thingiverse.com/thing:5631 so much that I had to hack together a matching version for a spool holder.

This thing operates on the same principle as other four bearing spool holders and is sized for Makerbot sized filament spools.

Cubic print got a really rad filament spool thingiverse.com/thing:12744 but the holes in the center drove me nuts. The center by Cubic Print prints some 3 hours on my machine, my remix finishes in under 1h.

blog.byteb.org/2012/01/filament-spool-for-spindle-less.html

Filament guide to clip between the two Z-Motors.

filament dust remover for "hinged extruder". No fixing needed.

NEW VERSION AT: thingiverse.com/thing:16483

GRRF Protos top mount filament guide

Inspired by the MendelMax spool mount, this one is designed to snap onto the threaded rods of a prusa mendel. Parametric script provided for use with FreeCAD. Otherwise for standard prusa, the given STL file should work.

I recommend re-using spools with my Ultimachine Split-Spool Hack: thingiverse.com/thing:16758

This spool stand uses aluminum stock instead of wood. Plain old 1/4" aluminum stock is cheap. I also coated the bottom of the feet with Sugru for anti-slip purposes.

This is a redesigned Ultimaker extruder. It employs a MakerBot Mk6 drive gear over the 2nd gen bolt from Ultimaker. youtu.be/UmeMxHsAtbA

Just a carabiner. i use it to hold my filament in place.

The goal is to make 3mm filament from PET drinking Bottles.

(To this melting chamber any kind of drive can be mounted and any kind of plastic can bee fed but a PET-band stepper-feed is planned)

The he Centi PET Re-Extruder shall be easier to build and cheaper than exiting re-extruder projects. This shall be reached by making it smaller (20cm desktop size instead of 1m workbench size) and requiring its maximum output speed not to be very high (>= one printer input speed).

For a fully functional system additionally to this melting chamber there will be needed:
PET Cutter (A); PET Band Feeder & Guider (B); Filament cooler & catcher (C)
Those are not yet constructed.


This Melting chamber is Heavily influenced by the existing projects:
reprap.org/wiki/Web4Deb_extruder
appropedia.org/Waste_plastic_extruder
thingiverse.com/thing:12948
recyclebot.tumblr.com/
kickstarter.com/projects/rocknail/filabot-plastic-filament-maker

The only differences are that it is smaller (thumb sized) and it has some additional features which are only possible since it's a 3d printed design. Those features will be more thorougly discussed in the following design decisions section:



DESIGN DECISIONS:

Since its smaller size it has much more surface area per volume and thus huge-er thermal losses. So a bit more care must be taken for thermal isolation.
SEE: [INSTRUCTIONS -> Assembly] for application of thermal isolation.

The chamber is open on both ends => easy cleaning easy nozzlechange and nice thermal isolation with fibreglas-PCB endplates.
The chamber is symmetrical => no wrong assembly possible.
Lots of spikes (16) and wedgecuts (2) provide air pockets under the isolation to give additional thermal isolation.
The screw aligners are open and sharp pointed for minimized thermal contact to the screws.
Wall thicknesses are kept minimal for lower material volume and thus price.

Lamellas:
PET has a very high thermal resistance [0.28W / (m*K)].
The steel lamellas [shapeways infused steel: 22.6 W/(m*K)] decrease the termal equilibration time quite a lot.
The gap between lamellas should be choosen as a tradeof. With smaller gap size the maximum feed speed for reasonable thermal exchange rises but if the gaps become too narrow viscous friction will kick in (laminar flow). An optimal geometry would require numerical simulations and narrowing gaps (this is overkill).
The minimum lamella thickness is given by the printing process and should be around 1.5mm for steel prints.
The outer isolation (thermal resistance similar to PET) should be thicker than the distance between lamellas. I hope the airpockets are ganna help here. As of now I've choosen the gap size as small as possible so that it remains reasonably cleanable but it wouldn't hurt to do some conservative estimative calculations. (TODO)

-----------------------------------

I chose PET as primary feeding material out of following reasons:
1) Drinking Bottle PET has a reasonable low melting point ( 230°C ) (due to some additives ?) SEE:
blog.reprap.org/2009/03/drink-bottle-feedstock.html
I tested melting it with my soldering iron set to 220°C and it melted easily!
2) It can be cut to very slim long stripes which lend themselve for feeding into a small melting chamber entrance with an hobbed bolt drive (no auger drill drive intended)
For cutting devices I found this nice website:
utsumi.com.br/pet/English/filetador/index.html
## The first two steps in PET bottle processing must be treated with different parts that are yet to be constructed
>> Centi PET Cutter -- see (A) below
>> Centi PET Band Feeder & Guider -- see (B) below
3) Very good mechanical properties prints similar to PLA (diff temp) but is not brittle at all.
Though hygroscopicness & re-crystallisation may degrade it a bit.
4) IMO it smells less obnoxious than HDPE fumes


################################### TODO
(A) Petcutter
Is it possible to construct a small one that is easy to handle?

(B) Feeder & Guider
the drive mechanism must solve
# backlog
# PET band creasing avoidance or control over it ("snakelooping")
"channel to be the thickness of the folded strip"
=> maybe too thinn to print.
directly feeding the pet band to a printer?
=> probably not for an bowden tube printer.

(C) Filament Cooler & Catcher
important for constant diameter
design so that it can be directly fed into a bowden tube
####################################

Out with the old reel, and in with a new one! Some problems that come with printing parts using the last bit of plastic in a reel have been bugging me for a while, as it's usually difficult to judge whether something that you want to print will use up all the remaining plastic, and how it does so.

You can take an approach of printing something so large that there isn't quite enough plastic to complete it, and the object gets truncated, but there are very few basic printer parts with a large unnecessary section at the top for your uncertainty to fall within, so most of the time one can't be sure if the printer will run out of plastic before finishing a crucial section.
You could also run a few print jobs of very small parts, but then you either have a significant length of waste plastic at the end, a final print of small parts that may not be useable if you run out halfway through, or you end up printing one of Zeno's paradoxes to try and avoid either of those fates.

I've tried to develop something that solves the first option, while always producing something useful at the end, so long as you're within a very wide printing margin. I'd say this print comes with an element of a nice surprise in terms of what size your box is, but you might want to check on the print as it runs out of filament, and stop it on a layer just before the loose end goes past the filament drive, so that you don't end up with a mess or have the extruder drive grinding away at its idler for a while.

Alternatively, if you have some awesome ninja printing skills, you might be able to get a new reel of plastic on whatever spool you use, in time to feed the new starting loose end in directly behind the old end without stopping the print. However, if you could manage that without hiccups in nozzle output, then you wouldn't even need this thing to begin with.

These handy trays can be used to sort small fasteners, jewellery, fishing tackle (all the same really) or similar bits, with a lid that gets completed at the start of the print.

This is the best, most practical, and simplest filament manager I've seen or used for a Prusa Mendel. It gets the filament reels out of the way into "unused" space above the printer, allows you to stage two reels for easy switching back and forth, and makes it simple to change reels and to see how much filament is left. When printing, the filament itself is in free air between the reel and the extruder head so there are no jams or problems.

Holds from 1lb to 5lb standard filament reels.

Very much a work in progress! This is an odometer for filament! It should measure filament by the centimeter so you can have a real measurement for filament used! The base it attaches to slides on to the counter assembly, so you can chose different mounts for it, but the first mount is for a ToM endcap.

I'm currently printing the first set of parts to validate the design, after some tweaks, I'll upload the first working design to share and build from!

The next version will have a second resettable counter. I will also provide just the counter mechanism as a separate "thing" once I make sure everything works okay.

This "thing" is a filament guide for the Thing-O-Matic, requiring no modifications to the machine body. It simply snaps in place of any of your ToMs' top guide-rod openings (uncovered, of course), depending on the location of your spool holder.

My ToM's Z-axis motor wires run into the back/right opening at the top of my ToM, so I designed this guide with a channel for those wires. Your adaptation of this model may require repositioning that channel, or simply adding that channel to all sides of the model (it's up to you... hey, it's a free world here).

This "upgrade" or "modification" piece was designed to snap into any of your ToMs' top guide-rod openings. My print did not "snap" in, but fit well. The base of the model works very well, but the guide arms need to be fully reworked. After using this in conjunction with my own filament spool holder, I now know the geometry needed to make this part work. The guide arms need to be removed & completely redesigned (they are backwards, and their size needs to be increased).

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!!! PRINT THIS PART AT YOUR OWN RISK & WASTE OF PLASTIC! I have printed this object with success, but it does not meet my requirements yet(and probably not yours).

This "thing" works, but the arched guide arms do nothing & tend to put a lot of uneccessary stress on the "A" axis (filament drive stepper motor) of my Gen-4 ToM. (My filament spool holder needs a bearing, and my filament guide needs the proper geometry.) Yes, this filament holder works (at least the center part works), but the guide arms need to be reversed (per Z axis) so that they hold the filament UP instead of DOWN... (and repositioned somewhat) and they could be a bit thicker, for sure! (If you don't trust me, go ahead and print this object. You'll see.) Everything but the guide arms work great!

Version 2 is located here: thingiverse.com/thing:15066

This is a bracket for mounting a Wade's Accessible style 3mm filament drive on an Ultimaker with an integral 1/4" OD tube bowden cable interface to slide in the retaining nut.

The filament tends to slip out of the hobbed area of the extruder drive bolt on my machine. I wanted to make a new extruder block, either thingiverse.com/thing:13530 or thingiverse.com/thing:14317 but of course, because my extruder couldn't be left unattended for more than a minute or two, and this is a big part, I couldn't ever get one finished.

So this is just a little insert that sits inside the extruder chamber, and prevents the filament from being squeezed out. It's dead simple.

This bracket is designed to hold the plastic filament feeder, on to the rep rap (Huxley modal).

This OpenSCAD script will generate a 2 part fitting for making a large structure using wooden dowels and screws or bolts
This can be used to create a simple printing plastic spool holder

To Do:
add option for connecting struts between top and bottom in side by side mode

Changes from previous versions:

v1.3 2011-12-05
- allow user to make a simple pass through type version that can be used as a support for heavy loads of plastic
- allow user to choose if rounded or square corners
- allow user to choose if 4th screw hole included or not
- allow user to choose if it is a "top" type i.e. cylindrical holes for rods/dowels centre aligned along diagonal
- removed and fixed up the hardcoded translates and variables to make it more parametric
v1.2 2011-11-14
- reoriented and aligned shape
- Added option to choose individual hole countersinks
- added option to use mouse ears
- rounded corners of cube shape
v1.1 2011-11-14
Mark modified Maeve's Code
- added countersink, counterbore and captive nut ability and variable to module call
- added ability to easily make mirrored version
- cleaned up some of the code
- added some comments
- moved (centred) the screw hole for the on end dowel
- Added radius fudge factor to increase diameter to reduce need for post processing

v1.0 2011-11-10
- First attempt
- This was the first thing Maeve ever designed/programmed, pretty much all her own work too. Go you!

This is a filament holder. I designed it to have the least amount of parts. The printed parts are printed on a Felix 1.0 3d printer from felixprinters.com

The goal was to mount it vertically on the aluminum frame of the printer, but the filament was intertwined so when rolling of it got stuck. For these kind of filament rolls, it is good to put it on a flat surface (floor, table).

It is reliable and hasn't failed me yet after printing for lots of hours.

Ingredients:
2 bearings (inner diameter: 8mm outer diameter: 22mm)
3x 250 mm M8 rods
1x 50 mm M8 rod or bolt
14x m8 bolts
3x printed parts

I was netting nice ink coverage with: thingiverse.com/thing:13624 but I started having issues with hardcore reversals that would send the marker shaft rotating into position so that the z stage couldn't raise further due to the Sharpies hitting the bot's ceiling. So,,, I increased the shaft's length at the bottom to clear the MK6 extruder stepper and fan with the lowest mounted Sharpie (leaves the most room for vertical movement) and added a latching brace that utilizes the MK6 top right M3 bolt so that reversal torque movement is eliminated.

I took the original stl that Bryan Duxbury uploaded and imported it into SketchUp (also attached below) and made my mods. Let me know if you have any issues with printing or functionality. As you can probably guess this was only tested on a factory MK6 setup and I have no idea if previous extruder builds will work.

This was printed and used on:

TOM # 4890
MK6+
1.75mm
.4 nozzle
ABP with aluminum plate topper and titanium belt covered in kapton

Another filament spool but this time with aluminum parts.
Yes, I love the aluminum and use it often for my works.
So I created this project starting from a bar of aluminum 10x10.
My intention was to create a filament spool with a variable diameter to fit the different providers of filament.
I also need to attach the spool to the workbench. So I made the pin with a nut 6MA inside(fig 4 and 8). I really like this idea, although it is not mine, but do not remember where I saw it. Of course anyone can change the base of the shaft to suit your needs.
The central hub can be mounted in either direction, it changes the ledge of the spool. (fig 5 and 6).
Sometimes it is useful to fix an end of the filament. Each stirrup has a slot with variable widths for filaments of diameter 1.7 and 3mm to secure it (Fig 7).

For this project, you need two Bearing 608ZZ and aluminum bar pierced 10x10mm, about 600mm.