Lint Roller Spool Holder

thingiverse

I recently bought a spool of Hatchbox filament, but the hole is too small to fit on the Printrbot Simple Metal spool rack. I like the idea of the horizontal spool holders, but they use up a lot of plastic. So I decided to mix that with my original spool holder, which was just a lint roller clamped to the aluminum handle. I have also been playing around with OpenSCAD recently and decided this would make a good weekend project. Et voila, one filament spool holder. To keep the design simple, I used netfab to cut the guide arm off the PrintrbotSpoolHolder, then added a mounting point for it and a cut lint roller. I have also been messing around with friction welding and had planned on friction welding the roller and guide arm. But the fit ended up being tight enough that I am not sure it is necessary. To make the print quick (~40 minutes), the STL is made with 1mm walls. It is fairly flimsy, but has held up for me so far. The arm has a bit of deflection when the filament is pulled, but so far so good. The walls can be changed in the scad file. Along with the lint roller size. Instructions Find a lint roller (hopefully one that is mostly used). Remove the tape and measure the plastic tube part. If the diameter is about 36mm you are in good shape. If not, open the scad file and change the diameter to suit your needs (note that I have only printed it with one size, but it renders fine with others!) Mark a straight line around the tube (where the tape was) and cut it. Try to keep it flat, but it is not critical. I left about 50mm of the tube, mainly so I could cut it again if I needed to. Print out the Guide Arm. Print out the Spool Holder. It needs a lot of support. Sorry :-( I printed the Spool Holder upside down, with 0.3mm layers, 0.8mm walls, 0.9mm top/bottom, and 20% infill. If you want a stonger part, you may want to use the 2mm version (again, I have only printed out the 1mm version) and/or a thicker shell, etc. Clean off the supports, and drill out the holes if needed. Push the cut lint roller handle into the round recess. Fit the holder onto the aluminum handle with the square recess toward the build plate. Use M3 screws (I had a few leftover from the Printrbot build) to secure it (I had to do a bit of bending to get it to fit). Push the guide arm into the square recess. Load spool onto the handle, fish filament through the guide arm and into the extruder.