I’m in the process of adding a second extruder to my 3D printer. I’d like to print a Saturn5 or V2 rocket in a single go with the dual extruders.
I ordered a masterspool set from SunLu with black and white filament. IF you haven;’t heard of MasterSpools, they are a great idea to allow you to be more environmentally friendly while 3d printing. Instead of each troll of filament having its own non-recyclable and heavy plastic spool, you have a spool that can come apart. Then when you buy filament, you just buy the filament itself, which saves on shipping costs and all the pollution associated with it.
I had to make my own masterspool since the filament set only came with one. I didn’t want to use a ton of filament to make it, and also wanted it to be strong so I used this center bolt design (hafner.stl) (though I might switch to this one as it has a little more grip on the ends). I tried reusing an old spool like in the examples in those links but the centers were too big for the filament so I made my own.
I downloaded FreeCAD to test out and drew the flanges for the spool to cut on the laser. Learning CAD and constraints is foreign to me and the cause of literally all my previous 3D CAD failures in the past. I made a video showing how to set up FreeCAD and make these spools to remind myself how to use FreeCAD later.
After laser cutting, the sides stank of burned wood, so I scrubbed the soot off the cut edges and soaked them for a little while in water with white vinegar as I’d read online helps. It didn’t work well.
I cut a few inches off the end of a tube used to store vinyl for the vinyl cutter as the spacer and it kept the two flanges the appropriate distance apart, but ended up slipping and making them misalign. This caused the spool not to be usable on either a sit-on-bearing style OR a center post style filament holder. I took to inkscape to make a quick SVG of some spacers to place inside the cardboard tube of the center of the spool. This hugged the center post and kept the cardboard centered correctly and now the spool works for both styles of filament holders.
You can download my files here if you’d like to make one yourself.