Filament Spool based Filament Spool Storage

One of the most common questions I hear from people that are new to 3D printing is, “What do I do with all these empty filament spools?” It’s a great question and aside from the obligatory “spool organizer” response, the options are fairly limited. I’ve long thought that the spools themselves could be used as raw materials for building larger projects. If you do enough printing, eventually you’re going to not only have lots of empty spools hanging around but lots of full and partial spools stacking up that need a home. With minimal additional parts you can use those empty spools as a raw material to create a modular, expandable storage space for your full spools.

Included are models to accommodate spools from several major filament brands - Atomic Filament, Prusament, Hatchbox, Esun (transparent spools), and Jessie (from Printed Solid). The dimensional differences between the brands are minor but important in a ‘load bearing’ application of the spools as a raw building material. You’ll also need some 16mm rods or dowels (5/8ths inch should fit well, though I haven’t yet tested with imperial sizes), and some M3x10 screws with square nuts (6-32 machine screws fit well without the need for nuts). The rods in the pictures shown are up-cycled from my daughters loft bed that she out-grew. The models provided have been modified from the ones pictured to allow about 5 more mm of clearance between the rods.

The feet can be used both as ‘feet’ and also as a vertical wall support that can be attached to the spools and affixed to a wall for stability and support (only needed at the top of the stack and every few levels between to help prevent racking and swaying if you’re stacking more than two or three levels). Some spools will require additional holes being drilled in order to get the attachment points symmetrical. Notable exceptions are Prusament, Esun, and Hatchbox as they already have the required symmetry or can be disassembled and reassembled (Esun) to achieve this.

Print hot with at least 3 perimeters, 10% infill, no supports.

As a final note, this is a great opportunity to point out that of all of the filaments that I’ve used to date (far more than what I’ve listed here), Atomic Filament is the only filament manufacturer that I’ve found that puts a plastic recycling code on their filament spools (props to Atomic Filament for that!). Coming from a plethora of companies that live and die by the manufacture or packaging of plastic products, I find this to be a bit perplexing. I implore you all to start putting recycling codes on your spools! I believe most of them are polystyrene or polyethylene which is very recyclable but without the code on the spool, municipal recycling programs won’t take them!

I’m releasing these models under an open source CC-A license to encourage up-cycling of empty filament spools and hopefully keep some of them out of landfills by offering a secondary use for them. With the addition of a board (or even card-board) these could easily be adapted to become book shelves or to serve any number of other storage purposes.

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