Fancypants Giants Causeway spool holder (20 mm ID)

thingiverse

I was creating a spool holder design that holds a spool at 45° so it can be printed as a single piece without support, and I got a little carried away. Hexagons are simple in Tinkercad, and this arrangement reminds me of the Giants Causeway rock formation or a pile of rubble on a shoreline being pounded by surging waves. This holder accepts spools with a minimum inner diameter of 20 mm and a maximum outer diameter of 70 mm. The holder should work with spools of any height. The bottom of the spool is evenly supported by the holder, and there's an eye to pass the spooled material through. Print Settings Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.2 Infill: 15 Post-Printing I recommend adding adhesive rubber feet to the bottom of the holder. Adding adhesive lead golf club weights would also be a good idea; they can be found on eBay at an affordable price. How I Created This Specification Many desktop spool holders on Thingiverse use the horizontal bar design, which usually requires a multi-part print and post-assembly. I wanted a spool holder that could be printed as a single piece without support, and a 45° holding bar was the clear solution. So the spec was: Single-piece and support-free printing. Hold the widest spool I have (70 mm OD) at 45°. Include an eye to hold and support the spooled material (especially important for the method I use to tin wires with solder). I had no idea about how it would look when I started, but designing from the bottom-up ensures that the object does the job intended. Roughing-out I first made the 45° holder bar. I chose a hexagon because these print very cleanly when the 'angle' of the hexagon is pointed downwards, compared to cylinders which are a little harder to print when tilted. When I looked at this bar, it became obvious that it would need a wide base to properly balance a large spool. I used a big triangle as a placeholder, positioned over the center of gravity, so I could eyeball it. Forming the base Since I had a hexagon for my holder bar, I decided to continue the hexagon motif. I copy-pasted lots of hexagons and randomly positioned them to form the outline of the base, then merged them all together. I duplicated and shrunk the base a little, and then used that clone to cut a recess in the center of the base. This left a clean, raised border to make the base look more finished. Adding decorations Since I had so much fun with hexagons for the base, I did the same to build up the material around the spool holder bar. I duplicated hexagons and messed around with their dimensions and angles to make something visually interesting. The most interesting thing I did in this step was design the support for the bottom of the spool. I made a cylinder with the dimensions of my spool, then turned it into a Hole object. In Tinkercad this makes the part see-through, but it also has the important property of darkening the parts of any other shapes that intersect the Hole. I positioned the spool placeholder on my holder bar at the correct height and angle, then angled and moved some of the protruding hexagons until their edges juuuust intersected the spool placeholder. This assured a completely flat support surface for the spool, even though the gaps between the protrusions are quite large. Finishing After that I simply cut an eye into a protrusion near the front of the holder with another Hole object (again a hexagon for support-free printing), and the job was done! Version history v1 — 13 Oct 2015 Initial release. Tinkercad source document https://www.tinkercad.com/things/dLJqP9xXbC-giants-causeway-spool-holder