I’ve posted about the issue I had with filament jumping the sides of the spool and threatening to get bound up around the spool support bracket. I said I was going to design & build a filament guide. Here it is:
Obviously, the left one is a top view, showing the guide bolted to the OEM support bracket. The right photo shows the reinforcing strut I built into the underside of the guide’s arm so, hopefully, it won’t break. So far, so good. And, indeed, the filament has not jumped the spool rim once, or even looked like it wanted to ;).
I printed the guide out of PETG, on the hope that the higher flexibility of PETG over PLA would avoid breakage.
Actually, i had this problem from the very beggining of my 3d printing life! The solution is to center the fillament output according the spool and everything is going to be OK!
[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“full”,“title”:“Fil_output.jpg”,“data-attachmentid”:2524}[/ATTACH]
The guide is working really well. It is not my permanent solution however. The filament is too high in the air right now. I want to make an enclosure for it. I already bought an Ikea Melltorp table, with 2 tops, as the basis of the enclosure. When I do that, I want the filament on a cradle, similar to the 1 you show, using 608 bearings, and have to filament come up. over the Y axis through a guide, and then down to the extruder. It should reduce the overall height by maybe 6 inches.
Also very handy during filament change or breakage. It cannot backlash to the spool and cause tangling. My TronXY X5 has two spool holders, so I just leave the unused spool in this little PTFE pipe to wait for the next use. No need to search for the holes in the spool or adding a clamp.
Well, as long as you have a mount point center to the spool it does not matter. I screwed one into my Anet cabinet floor, too. Basically all it needs is some tubing centered and near the spool to avoid filament to spring sideways.
Other solutions failed for me as filament retraction in combination with a direct extruder driving towards the spool fires the filament back to the spool. The spool does not turn, but unwind/loosen the filament and it springs off the tube. The PTFE tubing on the other hand flexes away sideways when the printer is trying to push the filament back to the spindle, so the filament bends before and nothing goes wrong.
Basically, and subject to reality setting in, my current plan is to use the 2 tops as a top and bottom of a box, the legs as a frame, and put the printer inside. I specifically got the Melltorp because it should be big enough to hold the printer.
