These are the official 3D printed Ultimaker 3 spool holder files. This 3D printed part was included in the first batch of Ultimaker 3 printers, bridge manufactured and supplied to our customers until we had injection-molded spool holders ready to ship.

The spool holder was designed to be printed with PVA support material. If you have an Ultimaker 3, you can also use the supplied gcode files to skip slicing and go straight to printing. These are the same optimized gcodes that were used by the Ultimaker 3 print farm at our production facility to create the spool holders!

Check out this timelapse of part of the Ultimaker 3 spool holder being printed with PVA support, and the PVA being dissolved in water:

When we redesigned the Ultimaker 3 spool holder to also contain the NFC antenna, this meant that the launch of the printer would have to be delayed by months if we had to wait for the new injection molds to be finished. Instead, we bridge manufactured the spool holders ourselves on an Ultimaker 3 print farm. Find out more about this process by watching the following video or reading the entire story here:
https://ultimaker.com/en/stories/23128-bringing-the-ultimaker-3-to-market-with-bridge-manufacturing