Reloading filament on a 3D printer is hardly anyone’s favorite task, but it’s even worse when you’re trying to shove stiff filament down a long and winding Bowden tube. Enter the speed loader from [Mr Flippant], which aims to take the pain out of this mechanically-frustrating chore.
The design is simple enough. It’s a small handheld tool that uses a 12 VDC gear motor to drive a set of Bondtech-style drive gears that you might find in an extruder. They’re assembled in a 3D printed housing with a microswitch to activate the motor, and a 9 volt battery to supply the juice.
To use the device, first thread the filament into the beginning of the Bowden tube. The idler gear is on a hinge, such that clamping it into position around the filament with the main gear activates the microswitch and turns the motor on, driving the filament all the way to the extruder. Job done! [Mr Flippant] notes that the filament should be as straight and unkinked as possible for best results, but that’s good advice when 3D printing in general.
Funnily enough, around these parts, when we talk about speed loaders, we’re usually discussing tapes.
Thanks to [LookAtDaShinyShiny] for the tip!
IF your Bowden tube is THAT long that you feel you need this gadget, then it´s just TOO long.
It is still useful for avoiding grease contamination from fingers.
There was a time when people put an oily sponge in the filament path and printed succesfully. I think your fingers grease has got zero impact on anything :)
Yes, but prints back then were decorative trinkets. Now even a novice can build aerospace-grade parts for their drones using a printer they got off Amazon.
Typical drones have no ‘aerospace-grade’ parts.
‘Speed loaders’ for tapes?
Never heard of such a thing.
‘Speed loaders’ are typically for revolvers.
@HaHa who said “typical”? “Can do X” does not mean “average”. Your lack of knowledge of a think doesn’t mean it’s fake. Archival tape speed loaders dump the tape to an online drive with the index in memory as quickly as possible to allow random access to data, they have been around for close to 50 years.
I disagree that early fdm were only used for trinkets in this same context. Plenty of aerospace uses there.
A 9 track tape drive was once marketed as a ‘speed loader’?
Like I say, never heard of it, but obscure hardware.
When they say “printed successfully” they mean the print did not interrupt in the middle of printing.
these are filament path tubes, rather than an oldschool bowden tube, on some machines they’re unavoidable, the prusa xl being an example in Teaching Tech’s video, with 4x 1m long tubes, the quicker you can reload during a big print, the less chance of print errors occurring.
And sure, if you’ve got one printer and aren’t going through much filament or doing filament changes very often, not using soft filaments like tpu, then the device is probably not for you.
I’ll be sure to let my 1200x600mm printer know that it needs a shorter filament path.
i don’t get it. when i had a bowden tube, it had an extruder on it that did this task for me. why would i want a second extruder?
wait a second is this one of those “the kids don’t have a G-code terminal” things? loading my tube went like this:
It is a reverse Bowden tube, the extruder motor is in the toolhead. This is just for guiding the filament to the extruder from the spool.
There are 5 of these tubes so Prusa reduced cost, size and complexity by not machine feeding new spools. I see this kind of tool as useful for softer filament such as TPU as they are a pain to feed, basically pushing wet noodles.
A solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. If you want to create a complicated gadget to address a non-issue, have at it, but don’t try to push it as something that I need when I don’t. I manage 5 AMS, several printers and several external spools just fine, thank you.
Found the guy who can’t recognize youtube thumbnail hyperbole
Seems like a good way to avoid RSI and to touch less of the filament with my sweaty greasy grabbers.
If I had to push bowden tubes multiple times per day every day, I’d make or buy one of these as a workflow optimization.
9V is a terrible battery, they are between $2.50 and $5.00 where I live.
Using 6x 50 cent AAA or AA is $3, but provides double or quadruple the run-time. You could add a one-time Boost circuit for a couple dollars and run it on 2x AA or a single salvaged 18650 cell as well. I am finding rechargeable vapes thrown away on the ground now. With USB-C charging. Wear gloves to cut it open. But free battery and charger.
The math:
Energizer Industrial datasheet on their 9v has a 380mah capacity at 500ma draw.
Their AA ‘Max’ battery datasheet claims about 1600mah at a 500ma draw. So about 4x runtime for 20% more cost.
You should probably compare power density:
9V 380mAh = 3.42 Wh
1.5V 1600mAh = 2.4Wh
A 1.5V motor probably doesn’t have the torque you need.
rechargeable 9v are definitely better, and quite inexpensive. The voltage of the gearmotor means a lot less than the gear reduction. I recommend a 500rpm@12v (250@6v) gearmotor. It has plenty of torque. Anything faster has less torque and is easy to overpower.
FYI you can buy a usb-c charging lithium “9v” battery.
Bro what? How long are your tubes? 😂
I have never loaded a filament and thought, “man I need a machine for this”.
This is about automation more than speed, that’s mostly for fun. Being able to automate a spool change can be useful for a variety of reasons from using too much material for one spool to multimaterial prints, so this isn’t really unwarranted.
I have a CORE One with a dry box mod on the side – I saw this a while back and considered building one. It’s not that it’s the long filament path that’s the pain- it’s the overall filament path and the tight space (with my dry box) that make it kind of a pain to load.
Ultimately, I decided that I don’t change filaments often enough to justify a dedicated tool for it.