Filament Winder - Stepper powered DIY PETBOT

cults3d

This is my take on the Make your own PET filament craze going on in the world. You can find lots on youtube about how to cut and reform Drink bottles in to PET filament that you can use in your printer. This is the tool you can use to pull the filament through the hotend doing the reforming and then spool it nicely at a constant rate. The gear reduction is amazingly strong, even with just a NEMA17 stepper. Designed to be almost 100% 3d printable, unlike others out there. this also uses a standard, super cheap bearing and shaft. Search on youtube for mr3dprint for how to use this after you have made it, and for a list on how to make the hotend etc. This is just the winder. I made this in tinkercad as the one I saw online used different uncommon bearings, and another was behind a pay wall. This model is printed and tested working. Needed to complete; 4 - Common 608 bearings 2 - 4.5" lengths of 8mm rod for axles. 1 - NEMA 17 Stepper motor or something with same bolt pattern You will need one of each part listed, with the exception of the spacer, you will need 4 of those. The main spool has provisions for 8 bolts, but it can be snapped together and super glued or hot glued instead without problems. No other hardware is needed, as I designed this to be as close to entirely 3d printable as possible. Bearings are a simple press fit. Mount the stepper motor a tiny bit loose so that you can slide it in and out of the gear to unwind the filament when you are done. I designed the body parts to use as little filament as possible to make for a faster print and to use less filament. This was modeled after watching the Youtube Videos by several russian and polish makers, and then finally Mr3dPrint showed enough in his videos that I could reproduce it on my own for you guys! I would suggest the Gears be printed on a raft to avoid elephant's foot creeping in and making a tight fit, but I didn't and it works just fine, loosened up after some use quite nicely. I want to mention that i did not invent this IDEA, this is my version of an existing idea but faster, and WAY less non printable hardware.(just two rods and 4 bearings) You could use printed bushings in place of bearings, but I have lots of bearings. You could replace smooth rod with threaded if you desire, as long as it is 8mm. All parts designed in Metric using Tinkercad. I have listed this as a work in progress, but it is finished and working as is. This was to open it up to suggestions for improvement if anyone has any ideas, feel free to msg me and I will see what I can do.