Spool for loose filament

thingiverse

I prefer purchasing the small sample packs of 1.75 ABS filament on Ebay, each weighing 50 grams and measuring 12 meters in length, making them quite compact. I consistently struggle to feed these tiny spools into my printer. While browsing online, I stumbled upon a design that caught my attention and decided to remix it. To make it compatible with my printer's hub, I added a substantial 50mm hub and duplicated the hole size from the standard 1 kg spools. The arms were shortened significantly, allowing me to flex a short roll of filament over the U-shaped arms. They were then securely attached to the hub using glue. After putting this design to the test, I reached a conclusion that smaller is indeed better. I believe my initial 30mm hub was slightly too small and the new 50mm hub was overly large. It works, but it feels rather sloppy. To address this issue, I created an adapter ring that reduces the 50mm hub to a 32mm one, making it a press fit without needing glue but requiring some force to insert. I enlarged the original 30mm hub to 32mm, and Hub-1 features this modification, while Hub-2 has the adapter built right in. I designed three different lengths of arms: short, medium, and long. The shortest ones require gluing, whereas the other two have a screw-in feature. Observing my small spools of filament, I found they came in these approximate sizes. Additionally, I created a driver that's tapered like a cone to fit into a 32mm hub. On its back side, I added a 1/4" square socket so it can be connected to a 1/4" hex adapter and turned using a cordless screwdriver. Please view this video for further clarification: https://youtu.be/rB5SNeqlLPc