ANET A8 Spool Strut 160 mm

thingiverse

I bought some kilo filament spools and wanted a wider unwind stand than the stock width that came with my ANET A8, a 130 mm strut. So here is the 160 mm strut. The quick change spool sprocket was designed by jadames and you can see my make and the required hardware list here: https://www.thingiverse.com/make/442287 I made two! This with the ANET stand and the wider strut fit the Monoprice kilogram spools which are 57 mm ID, 194 mm OD, 76 mm Wide. I did a remake using Goldie1471's foot bracket as basis for the wider strut to fit the stock ANET spool holder. It is longer and has added stress relief holes and scallops to reduce print warpage. A two-up G-code file is included in the downloads to get you started quickly. Printer Settings Printer: Anet A8 Prusa i3 kit clone Rafts: Yes Supports: No Resolution: 0.1 Infill: 20% Notes: Printer settings are speed 60, temp 200 C, plate 60 C, 1.75 PLA, and flow 100%. Build with 8 mm brim from my file above PI_Spool_Strut_160_mm_2up.gcode 80x160x4 mm and estimate 4 hours 2 minutes and 6.7 meters -- I call the part a strut, means the same as foot bracket. Thanks Goldie! Post-Printing AFTER: Jadames spool chuck on bearings with 5/16ths rod, the 160 mm strut at bottom. BEFORE: 8mm rod through 1 kg spool with no chucks, does not turn well, note new 160 mm struts in red to space A side pieces wider for screw chucks in AFTER photo How I Designed This I used TinkerCAD group and hole commands to make the piece. Goldie's piece had the screw slots on the end so I didn't have to do that work of making slots. What I needed was a spool strut piece 30 mm longer than the stock strut for the 140mm screw and nut chuck of jadames for my 57mm ID spools of 1kg. I imported Goldie's piece into TinkerCAD. I moved the piece to the left 15 mm. I imported the piece again. The new import is moved right 15 mm. Since this was the first time I used TCAD, I just hit the arrow keys 15 times, each tap of the arrow key is a 1mm move. Eventually, I figured out how to just fill in the XYZ dimension boxes, it's quicker to move a part that way. So I selected both parts and did a union (old school) by picking the 'group' command. From there, I picked a hole piece and used a cylinder of 15mm diameter and placed five of them uniformly through the center of the strut. Why five? Aesthetics, it just looked nice. I printed the part and it warped badly so I placed ten mm half-circle scallops on the edges, offset three mm, to reduce edge stress. You just make this stuff up as you go along; I thought six scallops of a slightly shallow half-circle would work, and yes it does. The part no longer pulls up during the build but is still prone to some warping. Put the top side of the build to the outside when assembling the spool holder.