Poor Man's DIY Filament Winder

That. Is Awesome.

I wonder if the extrusion speed has to do with pellet feed - typically this is the reason for slow extrusion with vertical setups, the pellets don't feed smoothly down the hopper. You could try tilting it 20-30 degrees or so so the nozzle is more towards the wider, they should feed better.

1.45mm is happening because of how tall the loop is, and the fact you're running fanless.

You're talking ABS. How about PLA ? PLA wont curve like that, you'd have to go father apart.
When you get further apart you realize that PLA doesn't like to be too far, it starts to get smaller.

My local Micro Center just throws them in the recycle bin!  They work great for this though since they are skinny enough not to need a moving guide to wind it properly.  The Christmas light spools also work relatively well for this and cost next to nothing.  The only issue with them is that they tend to cause filament to bunch up at the center while winding since I have no fancy servo to guide it across the spool.

Well there's ebay for the cheap electronic stuff (just the arduino really), photoresistors from radioshack (or in my case my school), and the rest of the parts are really from toys I played with as a young kid.  The computers were from family members who would have thrown them out otherwise, but they serve no purpose other to hold things up structurally here.  I'm still in high school, so these still are "around the house" items.  Not too sure what I'm doing once I get to College; I'll probably have to leave the printer and filastruder behind and get to know my local hackerspace.

Either way, this stuff really isn't too hard to find even on a budget if you can't find a substitute around the house.  Something else worth noting is that I have now upgraded to a gearmotor on the setup, rather than the original K'nex one.  That didn't always start when power was sent to it, destroying the loop, so I figured the upgrade was worth the $6.