Anycubic i3 Mega narrow and frictionless Spool Holder Mod

thingiverse

I placed my Anycubic i3 Mega inside an IKEA housing, specifically the STUVA cabinet with a SINDVIK glass door. The cabinet is spacious enough, but once the printer is installed, there's limited room for the spool and its holder. The original spool holder that came with the i3 Mega isn't bad; it allows you to remove the spool upwards along with the axis on which it's mounted. However, the holder itself is too wide for this compartment, so I designed a modification to make it narrower: approximately 90mm instead of its original width of 123mm. Even though 90mm is still a comfortable fit for all my spools, I had to create a new axis for the narrow spool holder as well. As an added bonus, this solved another problem I'd been dealing with the old axis - excessive friction. Sometimes, when most of the filament was consumed and the spool became light, the original axis would cause too much friction, pulling the spool towards the extruder and resulting in printing fails. In other cases, the extruder motor couldn't overcome the high friction generated by a new, heavy spool, leading to those annoying "knock-knock-knock" sounding extruder failures. To address these issues, I used some inexpensive 608 ball bearings in my design. Update: A bushing has been added to keep the five bearings in place on the rod. When using five bearings like me, print the bushing six times and place them between the bearings as well as at the ends of the rod for optimal performance.