Filament Display Stands

This week's post showcases some filament stands that we designed and printed as a class in order to display our various colours of filament in a way that would be both organized and visually appealing. Organizing our filament supplies in these 3D-printed display stands would make it easier and more convenient for our team to switch filament colours during the print process, as opposed to just stacking the rolls on top of each other.

We needed:

12 standard-size filament stands (1 kg rolls)
3 half-size filament stands (500 g rolls)
4 quarter-size filament stands (250 g rolls)

The entire printing time took about 20 hours, with the standard size stands taking roughly 1.25 hours to print.

The Process:

These stands were designed and created by our school’s 3D print team. We found similar products on Thingiverse.com that we were able to use as a guideline, but we wanted to create our own so they could be customized specifically to the types of filament rolls we had.

We measured the width of the standard rolls when they were standing up (6.5 cm), and then we designed the stands to be about 0.5 cm wider than that in order to give the filament enough space to sit nicely. We also had to make adjustments to our design to fit the smaller rolls (500 g and 250 g rolls). We turned this calculation into a math problem to correlate it with percentages and ratios. (Example: If our standard roll is 6.5 cm wide, and our smallest rolls are 4 cm wide, what percentage do we need in order to decrease the width?)

Problems We Were Able to Troubleshoot:
Since we knew we needed enough stands to accommodate at least 15-20 rolls of filament, we wanted to find a way to save both time and filament during our printing process. We decided to make a longer, 3-spool holder to make the process more efficient. This change shortened the printing time by about 30 minutes, due to the fact that we needed to print only 4 wall dividers, rather than 6 (i.e. 2 on each side) for a set of 3 (see photos, below). The overall process was successful and went very smoothly. We were able to save about 2 hours of printing time in total, with some minor adjustments on Tinkercad.

Final Thoughts:

As someone who loves to stay organized and is quite particular (maybe a little too much...) about how my classroom looks, these filament stands were among the first items I wanted to design and print once I had acquired a healthy stock of various filament colours. The size, scale, ratio, and math involved in designing these stands proved to be a functional math lesson for my students.

The best part about 3D printing your own organizers and functional products is that you can tailor them to the size of the object you are wanting to organize and display. We will be doing something similar for a variety of storage items (e.g. classroom supplies, math manipulatives, art supplies, etc.), both in our own classroom and throughout the school.

Before

After

Links and Products used:

We used "www.tinkercad.com" to create our calendar plates and our basket holder.
We used "Ultimaker Cura" as our slicer to adjust and customize our print files.
We used an Ender 3 V2 to 3D print our designs