Ender 3 Spool Holder, Easy Print, No Bearings

thingiverse

I looked around at a lot of spool holders, but most of them involved buying bearings and the ones that didn't require printed bearings were a pain in the neck to get working well (I tried). In the end I realized that bearings are probably overkill for this, and I was right. This design just uses a very simple wheel and axle that slot into the body. While I'm sure they aren't as smooth as a real metal bearing would be, they're massively better than the stock Ender 3 spool holder and this is all stupid easy to print. It's split into five pieces - the aforementioned wheel and axle, the body, a nut, and a "bolt" that has a triangular shape to fit into the body and lock it to the printer mount. You'll need to print two copies of the wheel and axle as there are two slots in the body for them. I also printed two of the nuts because I was experimenting with tolerances and I figure it will keep them from coming loose. I doubt that's necessary though. The threads are there if you want to use them. Tolerances are pretty loose on everything. If you do happen to have trouble with the threads, the nut can be scaled (in the x and y only!) to provide more or less space. The wheel and axle are intended to fit pretty tight to keep the wheel centered. I carefully pressed the axle in on a table. There again, if they don't fit quite right for you just scale slightly. I did have a bit of trouble printing the bridge at the top of the opening in the body, but I think that may have been because I had the top and bottom pattern set to concentric, which resulted in extruding in midair. It wasn't a big problem though, I cleaned out the saggy filament and it still mounted up fine. Main takeaway: don't use a concentric pattern for printing the main body. Do print with a reasonable amount of infill and wall lines. I think I did 20% and 4 respectively. It came out plenty strong at those settings. [Edit: Not true. I broke the bolt piece putting a new full spool on. I reprinted at 10 wall lines to make the thin part solid and will be more careful not to overtighten the nuts since that basically tries to pull the layers apart] Pay attention to orientation while slicing. The body in particular needs to be rotated to sit flat on the squared off side. If the wheels don't turn smoothly, you may need to sand down the z seam on the axle a bit. I didn't bother, but I also spent a fair amount of time dialing in my z seam while trying to print bearings so YMMV. :-) This is sized for standard spool dimensions. If you have one that is narrower, wider, or has an unusually small spool hole this may not work. It fits all of my spools with room to spare though. Anyway, hope you like it. This is one of my favorite things that I've designed so far.