Filament Spools/Reels

I am assuming that we were both printing out our spools at the same time, i designed one up that was almost identical to yours, it just has a screw thread to hold the two pieces together. The second half of it is printing as we speak.

I think ill reduce the amount of plastic in the spindle next time I printed it with only a small amount of support, but print times could easily be improved (by a lot).

edit: my printer needs some serious calibrating

The spool is about 144mm across (72mm radius), the spindle in the middle is a radius of 33mm and the overall width is 100mm or so. It isn't exactly the most efficient design ever, but it works. There are plenty of things that can be changed to make it better, the thread for the daughter part doesnt need to be so long, i just wanted to see if i could do it, the walls on the inside of the part dont need to be so damn big, etc etc.

The print really was to test a few things;

would such a large part stick to the bed ok? yes - too well on the print just with kapton, perfect with glass
can i make a thread that works? yes
will my black filament screw up and block the nozzle yet again? no it didnt, and im really confused .. ive printed for about 14 hours almost constantly with it now with no issues, so im a bit confused.

I can post the SCAD files for them if anyone is interested. The two parts screw together, so in theory, you can put it together and take it apart many times without any issue. The other question would be why you would want to do that? the answer is i have no idea, but its cool anyway.

I can't post a link yet since I'm new, but I did a couple of small hub rings that fit skater bearings for spools, so they turn on a 5/16 threaded rod (just use the rod and nuts to hold the bearing-hubs where you want). 

Search 'rtrski' on Thingiverse and they should show up.  I sized them for the type of spools you get from Solidoodle (the tall, narrower diameter ones) vs. the short, high-diameter one I got from Protoparadigm.  But if you import the STL somewhere else I'm sure it's easy enough to bump up the outer diameter to the 2" or so for the larger diameter spools.

I like your spool design, by the way - have you ever tried just dropping a neatly-wrapped loop over the hub, then assembling?  I've noticed my ABS has enough 'stiffness' that about half of it is semi-unwrapped from the spool anyway once I start printing (especially using bearings so there's very little rotation friction) but as long as it doesn't stray over the edges of the spool, it doesn't seem to tangle.