Simple Universal Spool Holder for 20x20mm extruded frame

youmagine

I was fed up with having excessively long spool holders sticking out of my printer's side and constantly swapping them out when the hub of the spool required a different size. I decided that the spool only needs support on one side, so I set out to design this holder. Since my printer is built using Misumi 20x20 extruded aluminum, I took advantage of it by utilizing it to provide a linear slot. This slot allows the pieces to be fully constrained and gives them 1 degree of freedom when the bolt is loosened. It's very handy indeed! You place the spool in the lower portion, loosen the bolt for the upper piece, then lower it down to capture the spool on the top edge, and finally retighten the bolt. At this point, the spool is fully captured and cannot fall out, yet it can move freely within the holder. As you can see from the photos, this design works with a variety of spool sizes using a simple vertical adjustment of the top piece. I prefer to have some friction to prevent the filament from spinning loose on the spool. With no modifications and printed with PLA, this holder has low friction, allowing smooth operation with no binding or loose coils of filament. If you prefer less friction, you can smooth the contact surfaces or even add some teflon tape to them to reduce friction. If there is sufficient interest, I will design a version with bearings for all the freewheeling, filament tangling fun you desire. This design was created on "ON Shape" web-based CAD. Here's a link to the project: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/6aa32e19c828316ad3dc0215/w/7ecae9aaefe9057e79e0a774/e/21d6c2c45bed128a63d94fd8 I think there will be more revisions to come, but I need to test it for a while to identify the weak points in the design. Having said that, it works quite well as-is and has had no problems with it so far.