This week’s selection is the unusual Spool Tool Desk Organizer by MatterHackers.
This design is essentially a way to make practical use of those dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of empty filament spools you’ve been needlessly saving after they’ve been used. I suspect that every 3D printer operation has a ridiculous number of these things lying around, in hopes of someday being able to use them for – something.
Well, that day has arrived. The Spool Tool Desk Organizer is a way to convert the otherwise useless, space wasting empty spools into a highly functional storage system. It also will enable you to collect all that small crap that’s been lying around on your desk or work table and put it all in an organized system.
The cylindrical nature of the spool is leveraged into a top and bottom for swinging drawers of multiple sizes. The files provided enable you to configure your empty spool in several different ways depending on your needs.
Assembly is also very interesting. You’d expect that this would require some nuts and bolts, but that’s not how it works. Instead you simply drill some holes in the spool holder at appropriate points and then slide the drawer in. A strand of filament is inserted through the holes of the spool and drawer, and is secured with some super glue. The hinge is actually a piece of filament and there is no need for nuts and bolts.
While this is a terrific design, there is a catch. It seems to be only available within MatterHackers’ ecosystem. MatterHackers provides a very powerful cloud-based 3D printing system that uses their MatterControl set-top box to make dumb desktop 3D printers much more intelligent.
Part of their cloud system is a personal library, where you can store designs or obtain them from MatterHackers’ design store, where this item resides. So it seems, at least for now, that this design is only available to MatterHackers participants.
There are a couple of alternatives, such as this one in Thingiverse, but they don’t seem quite as nice as the MatterHackers version.
Via MatterHackers
