Transcript:
Are you guys like me where you’ve been perfectly satisfied to keep using the stock Spool holder that came on your inexpensive Chinese consumer level 3d printer? Hey, you know the spools slide on it just fine. It does the job, right, but it’s not ideal and I’ll tell you why it’s because the friction of the flanges here sliding across that rigid bar is a force that the extruder has to overcome in other words. The extruder is doing two jobs now. It’s pulling on the filament just to unwind it from the spool. It’s having to pull a substantial amount and the second job is to actually force the filament through the nozzle and it should only be doing the second job that first job shouldn’t exist. So I’ve you know, gotten rid of this. One here’s an ender 3 similar design. It’s just got a cylinder that the filament spool is supposed to slide on, but with this spool, you can see There’s no flanges on the inside. It’s just a flat bottom to the internal hub here, which means there’s even more friction and what this would do is. It would kind of wind up like that, and then it would go clunk clunk wind up. Click clunk and that shaking causes weird artifacts that happen in the printer, so in an effort to quickly and easily combat that I put some wire through a couple of ptfe Bowden Tube lengths and that ptfe is quite slippery, so this slides nicely enough here, and I’ve got thousands of hours. Maybe just hundreds, but I’ve got plenty of hours printing on this design here and it worked, okay, but this, uh, increased flange diameter meant that if I had a smaller spool, it was harder to get it to go into there, so this is not ideal and I’m kind of kicking myself because it’s taken me just so long to finally implement one of these self-centering skateboard bearing friction free hub designs. Now these are available widely. And you’ve seen these on the internet. I found a version from 2013 even so they’ve been around forever and man. I sure wish that I had upgraded to that sooner, but even if you haven’t done it yet there’s nothing to worry because you still have a chance to get on the bandwagon for the absolute best spool holder design that’s ever existed, period. That’s this one right here and, uh, yeah, so it’s just a spool. Holder, You guys. It’s going to offer the same functionality as the ones that you can download from thingiverse now, but I have done a number of improvements to it, and I really do think it’s the best out there, so stay tuned and I’ll show you all about it. Let’s kick this off by doing a survey of the options that are already available to download. Because I’m not here to reinvent the wheel. I’m here to make things easy for myself and for you guys. And if it’s already been done as good as I can do it, I’m not going to redo this project just for the sake of saying that I did it now. The design that you’re looking at on the screen right now is problematic for one reason. Most of my spools look like this one where there’s a flange, you see it, so there’s a flange on the inside and one on the outside and the flange is what slides on the bar so by putting these three bearings across there, the flange is just going to hop off the bearings and it’s going to slide on the 3d printed. Plastic and the bearings are in effect. Not going to do anything for most of my filament spools. Okay, so this one is the oldest version that I could find of this idea from 2013 and it’s quite clever, You guys so look at that holding skateboard bearings threads on to some m8 rod and, hey, that works just fine as viable today as it was back in 2013 So Rob Botnick. I think that you are the OG, and we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming up with this idea. As far as my research goes, maybe somebody else thought of it first. So from here, though, lots of improvements to be made and look at this guy. Sneaky poo. Wow, this guy is talented. I went and looked up his other designs. He is doing some amazing work, really, really good stuff here. Look, he’s the one that came up with this like nunchuck. Um, headphone holder. Do you guys remember this? This went viral back in the day back in like 2012. Anyway. He came up with this idea back. In 2014 so one year after the first version, I was able ever able to find and it’s just overly complicated, but other than that the pieces are all there. There’s two cones, there’s skateboard bearings, and I’m sure this performs wonderfully even today. So good on you, Mr. Sneaky poo! I really like this version from 2015 so we’re moving up the years here. I like it because of that, Um, Cam lock so you should be able to just slide the second cone over your m8 rod and then just activate the cam lock and it won’t come loose, which is quite fast to install and quite securely locked in place instead of sort of threading that that second cone in place, this is a version from 2016 again looking quite viable. I like the quick disconnect nature of it. You guys can see the the whole Spool Axle comes out of the quick release mount. But I’m skeptical about how strong this quick release Mount is going to be, but still. Hey, that’s a clever idea. Well implemented good, solid design, but again that cone the second cone threads onto the shaft. This version is the version that I actually first saw in somebody else’s video very clean, just great looking version from 2017 But once again, the second cone threads onto the shaft. I really like this. This is from 2019 so just like a year and a half ago two years ago. And this is the auto. Rewind, some of you. Guys may have seen this in use with the Prusa mmu-2 where they need to the spools need to sort of retract. Yeah, so they can’t just kind of unwind and stay unwound. That’s problematic with that Prusa addition. So this is a very clever. Um, there’s a coil, not a coil spring. What do you call? These springs flat spring pack that, um, that rewinds the filament, so there’s sort of a friction clutch and then a rewind mechanism really not necessary for the majority of us to use might be kind of useful. I don’t know, chime in in the comments. If you’re using this and you find, uh, it to be necessary. Here’s a version from just last year again. Looking quite clean, really nice mounts to an Ender 3 or any creality spool Holder Mount. So that’s the appeal of this, but once again, the second cone threads onto the main shaft. This is another youtuber. He’s a Spanish language, youtuber. So that’s why I’ve not seen him until finding him here on thingiverse and he came up with this design here, which just mounts directly into the Ender 3 or any creality mount. So I’m going to print this one up and we’re going to begin the iterative process of coming up with my design right here. This is the filament Spool holder mounting bracket from an ender 3 And you can see. I’ve printed his design and I’ve got it with its bolt mounted in place so this is meant to receive the spool holder just like so, and, hey, it works, it works. It works great, right. The problem. Is that sometimes bad things happen and you drop things on your printer. That kind of a deal and you might have some force getting pushed on the end of this nozzle of this. Um, lever arm. So that is that is quite the the lever arm there quite a bit of a force of leverage acting on it. So if I go like this, you can hear it cracking. And what’s happening, lets. Just go for it. Well, it’s breaking in there. I actually thought it was going to break along the layer lines, but instead it’s kind of blowing it out through the middle there, so maybe with more support material or in-film material. I actually would not have had that problem, but the major problem that I have with this design in theory, although it just failed differently. Right now is the layer lines here can separate so layer lines are always the weak spot, and I’m just worried about relying on that layer line right there, right in the corner as this thing is pinching it over the metal bracket. So I want to change up that. Well, here’s my design. That’s pretty much the same as everybody else’s on thingiverse in functionality. So this eight millimeter rod goes through here and you can see that it spins on those two skateboard bearings and the major problem with all of these designs like this is that this can come unscrewed like this. So if you’re pulling the filament from this side where the filament is going like that, there’s always a chance that this friction here, if if this was easier to spin, so this is a very fast draft print and this doesn’t spin very easily, but if this was more easy to sort of like friction free movement, then the as the filament spool spins to let the filament out it might be unwinding this, which would in effect Pop this off, and then the same thing happens where as this is spinning. Uh, pulling filament. It can just keep spinning like so, and eventually unthread itself off the end of this, and it falls off in the middle of a print and disaster ensues. So I don’t know if this is a problem that anybody’s ever have, it’s just my like. You know, prediction of the future trying to remove all possible avenues of failure from a design. So my solution from the get go to. This problem was to add a jam nut to this very first iteration. So now those two pieces are, they’re not coming, unscrewed. They are jammed together and this would certainly work. But you have to unscrew this one, you know, first, and then you gotta unscrew the second one while this is while this filament roll is flopping and it’s just it’s kind of cumbersome, so this is a finished part made with this color gradient petg filament and you can see that the tolerance are such that this nut would just thread. So this is what I’m talking about, if the, um, if the spool was going up against the nut that could unthread itself, but this doesn’t spin because there’s a key way here The way this works is you just slide it on there. Slide this down the key way until it’s nice and tight and then tighten down the nut onto it. And there you have it a very fast Install for what should be a problem Free mechanism that won’t ever work itself loose now as far as the geometry on these cones goes. I really did design it for the full gamut of filament roll options. These are all the filament rolls that I have. As far as the extreme cases. This is the most narrow one, and it will work. Just fine, see there. This strange little sample will also slide over it. In case you ever get your hands on one of these. I’ve had a number of rolls in this standard where they are quite wide here but narrower in diameter. And you can see that works just fine. This standard here has no flange and it’s a very wide center hole. And that is the absolute limit for what I’ve designed this for. You can see it almost goes through, And in fact, if I’m very sloppy with it, but you’d have to tilt that at an extreme angle, But if I’m very sloppy with it, I can’t get that through crookedly, but that’s not going to happen. When you’re backed up against the vertical arm. Here you see you can’t. Get the you can’t. Get the roll to go past there. So that will mount just fine, and now that that’s in place, you can see just how easy it is to get a roll of filament installed onto the printer, and it just spins and spins and spins. I think what I’m going to do is add a little eyelet here just to help guide the filament and the reason for that is that I don’t want filament kind of unwinding sideways off the front here as the gantry pulls out, so you can see that that’s a possibility, but with a simple little guiding eyelet, it shouldn’t be an issue, so this is fully functional and I can use it just the way that it is, but I want to standardize it so that it’s an easy build for all of you. And that starts with a trip to the hardware store to pick up a bolt and some nuts. Well, everyone knows that the metric system is superior, but m8 bolts here at 100 millimeters long cost 2.50 of course, they do slide nicely over the eight millimeter hole in the skateboard bearings, but you can get 5 16. Inch bolts for a dollar each and the 4 inch bolt is almost exactly 100 millimeters long as well and it also fits almost perfectly inside of the bearing. So you’ll need to get a washer. Uh, a regular nut and a nyloc. Lock nut to go on your bolt. Whether you choose to go with metric or sae first thing to do is to get the bearings pressed into the axle. You should be able to do this by hand. Whatever it takes, you know, maybe bang on it with a wrench or something like that to get it started. And then I like to use the bolt with a single nut. Having the nut threaded to the middle of the bolt makes it feel a little more secure as you kind of lean on it with all of your weight. That’ll do this one back here is a little bit easier. Okay, with any of these brackets. Whether it’s this one here mounted to my FL Sun q5 Delta printer or this bracket here, which came off of my Ming to d2 we’re going to have to either drill a new hole that’s centered on on the brackets here or just use the existing hole and widen that to be eight millimeters or 5 16. I like to use a very large drill bit to deburr the hole. Now the bolt and the regular nut lock in place on the bracket. If instead you’re working with one of these creality brackets, you’ll need to print up this geometry and now you just join the two halves. This will be the hard part with the nylock nut You can get it started by hand, but you’re going to need a deep socket in order to finish the job. I’ve got it installed here on my belt printer. I’ll just put this decorative cap on to it, so we don’t see the nut inside of there loading. The filament is super easy and fast. You guys, and we’re ready to print, but it might spin too easily for you. So, in this situation, I can see how some people might complain that. The filament spool can kind of unwind itself. See if I’m feeding this filament up here, and it gets a good tug and it just keeps unwinding. This kind of situation could potentially happen. I don’t! I don’t really see that happening. In an automated situation. I think I’m kind of manufacturing the, uh, the impetus for that to happen right now, but I can see how the critique would be that it unwinds too easily, so the solution to that is to simply tighten down that nut, just a little bit more inside of there, and you’ll get a little bit of resistance and it won’t spin for quite so long. It still spins nice and free, but you can’t quite get it to spin forever. See, I’ve printed up a number of copies in both pet G and ABS. So you guys can download the files from Patreon. My patreon supporters know that you just got to send me a quick message over there and I’ll send you the link, uh, to where to get these now. I share these files with my patreon supporters. It’s my way of saying. Thank you to those guys who help me keep this channel going. Adsense revenue is just drying up. It’s ridiculous! Maybe it has something to do with a pandemic. I don’t know what’s going on, But if it wasn’t for my Patreon supporters, I say it every video, but I mean it I would not make videos. I just would quit. Uh, so thank you guys so much for keeping this channel going. And if you want your reward access to the printable files, let me know, and I’ll get those to you. So I printed all of these copies here on the two trees sapphire core XY printer, which is shaping up to be an awesome build. I’ve got it modified now, so everything on it is metal, except for the belts and the like covering over the wires, so that is going to function fantastically when I get it installed into a heated chamber, so those two videos, the modifying of this to be all metal as well as the heated chamber video are coming up, and it was during the course of that build that I even came up with this and thought it deserved. Its own video, so hence the video you just watched now? The one thing I did. Not cover is skateboard bearings and where to procure those. I have this random bag of them that I bought a long time ago. Off of ebay. They’re inexpensive 608 Uh, skateboard bearings are ubiquitous. You can even get them at the hardware store. Um, but you know, probably just order them on ebay. They’re really cheap. Abec 9 even is super cheap for skateboard bearings. So yeah, that’s that’s that wherever you get those. That’s that’s the final piece of the puzzle there. Um, yeah, what else to say? I don’t think we’re going to see these. Um, this design coming from China on our printer’s standard. I think this is going to be an upgrade. You do to every printer that you buy for the single reason that this takes. What was it like, two hours to print the main thing an hour to print the cone and like half an hour to print the, uh, the the nut, so we’re talking like three and a half hours of printing time to make this. So the manufacturers do not want to have a printer farm three and a half hours per part when they can, you know in like, 10 minutes, not even like three minutes, they can shape some metal into this shape, which does 90 percent of the job. Gets you 90 of the way there, so we’re gonna see this in perpetuity coming from China, so I think this is absolutely a fantastic upgrade that everybody should do to their printer. It does make your printer function just that much nicer and it also ELIM eliminates or alleviates the the potential for nozzle clogs. If you’re really trying to push filament through that nozzle really quickly or something like that, and you’re having to fight against the force’s internal to the melt zone and all of that, having extra forces to overcome pulling that filament off of the the filament holder, it’s not good, so you want to eliminate forces where they’re not supposed to be so. I think this is a good upgrade, and I certainly wish that I had done it sooner, but I’m happy as can be that I did it now. Finally, hey, speaking of Patreon supporters, you guys know who you are, but just for the rest of the world. This is them and these guys are the reason you got to watch this video. So you know, thank you so much and that’ll do it for this video. See in the next one. Thanks for watching bye.