October 25, 2018
Description
This is a spacer for the Wanhao i3 plus or Monoprice IIIP printer filament spool holder. It is designed to let you replace the very poorly designed original spool holder with standard 3/4" PVC schedule 40 pipe.
I found that the original spool holder was not wide enough to accommodate many of the wider spools of filament that I had, and the stand is too short to accommodate the larger diameter spools.
I solved both of these problems by replacing it with a very simple bit of 3/4" PVC pipe.
What you'll need
Basically this 'thing' does two things. First, it fills some of the space between the two threaded adapters which allows them to tighten up nice and snug. Second, it fills the gap between the metal ring on the printer, and the threaded portion of the adapters so they don't wiggle around.
To upgrade your spool holder, follow these steps:
Remove the existing plastic spool holder from the printer, but leave the metal upright to which the plastic bit was mounted.
Now insert this 'thing' into the hole in the metal upright and put the male and female 3/4" PVC adapters on either side, screwing them together. You can see a close up of this in the second picture. The grey piece is this 'thing' (the printed adapter) between the two (white) PVC threaded to slip adapters.
On one side, I cut a very short (2" long or so) piece of PVC pipe, followed by the PVC elbow, followed by a 6" piece of PVC. This creates a right angle mount for the larger diameter spools of filament (they hang down in front of the printer). I mounted this so that the pipe was angled up slightly so the spool would naturally want to sit against the edge of the elbow. You can glue the components on this side if you like. Thus far, I've found that is unnecessary as long as you really push them together very tightly.
On the other side of the threaded adapters I put another 6" piece of PVC for the wider but smaller diameter, spools of filament.
Hopefully the included pictures make it obvious what you are supposed to do.
License:
Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike
jbrown123
