Rewinding Feedstock: too much trouble.
Today, someone ordered 2kg of ABS filament, and I had only 5kg rolls left. “I’ll just wind off 2kg” I thought. Wrong. It isn’t easy (any way I tried, anyway). I will not be doing this in future.
I made a pair of drums on bearings that were intended to allow me to roll off filament quickly, driven by an electric drill, while weighing it.
Both drums lift off the stands and have a quick remove side so that you can get a roll of ABS on or off.
In practice there were a bunch of problems:
When I put one of the 5kg rolls of batch 0 ABS on a drum and simply pulled the end, it jammed: the bit I was pulling went down between all the other coils and got stuck. I think drawing it out of the middle like this would have been better.
The timing belt from the drill drive was too loose and kept slipping.
The drill was hard to accelerate gently, and went too fast. Really I needed a gearbox.
When the drill stopped (quite suddenly) the rotational inertia of the drum and ABS was enough to either make the whole thing fall over, or undo one of the nuts on the stud I was using as a shaft (despite lock nuts and thread locker), or both.
I gave up on the drill and moved both drums by hand. After ~200m of rolling and about 10 weighings I hand the 2 kg roll I wanted. This is just too time consuming to do regularly, and at the moment I have neither time to make nor space to keep a machine to do it well. Sorry guys, but you’ll have to buy feedstock in the size rolls that it arrives in. Only 5kg rolls are in stock at the moment.
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