Improved Spool Holder Design To Prevent Filament Tangles

Filament Spool holder that uses the weight of the spool to press rollers against the flanges and prevent filament from jumping off.

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Attribution

Inspired by this design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2479238

Description

This spool holder accommodates a wide range of spool sizes (at least 160-200 mm, probably more) and prevents tangles caused by the filament jumping over the flanges of the spool. It uses ball bearings salvaged from hard disk drives. The rollers are tapered to keep the spool centered in the holder.

Materials and methods

12 HDD bearings of the type in the photo. They are very common.
About 200 g of PLA or ABS.

You'll need to print one base, two each of arm1 and arm2, and four of the roller vases. The bearing holes in the arms and the roller vases have to be correctly sized to press fit the bearings, so print the test block which has different sized holes and see which one fits your bearings. You may have to modify the hole sizes int he CAD file to get it just right.

The rollers print one at a time using Slic3r's spiral vase mode so there won't be any seams or bumps in the surface. I used a 0.6 mm nozzle and set line widths to 0.75 mm, printing in 0.3 mm layers.