Ratcheting Filament Guide by scoot1417

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

I designed this to solve a problem I was having with new spools becoming tangled and jamming due to retractions and printer movements loosening the filament to the point that it falls off the edge of the spool.
This filament guide is designed to only allow the filament to move in one direction, maintaining some degree tension at the spool.
Additional bits required:
2x M3 nuts an bolts. Bolts will need to be cut to rather specific lengths to avoid colliding with the mechanism.
4x small washers (either side of the two wheels)
3x 2mm diameter rods acting as axles for the wheels and the tension wheel mount, cut to length.
1-2x small rubber bands for tension
Additional Comments:
I used a small nozzle (0.25) for the ratchet wheel to get sharper corners on the teeth. I found this helped a lot, though that was compared with a 0.6 nozzle which failed. I didn't try 0.4.
Use as high resolution as possible on the ratchet pin I used 0.05. This part is incredibly small so even at that layer height it was still only a 5 min print.
The whole thing will need to be anchored down to work, hence the 'surface mount' part. I designed this with dovetails so that it can easily be removed/added as needed. If you don't have an enclosure you would need to work out another way to anchor it, possibly off a spool somehow, though might need to redesign the surface mount part.