We decided when taking our Mendel for a trip to the office that the first project had to be a spool holder – feeding the filament manually was getting tedious and meant Mendel couldn’t be left to print unsupervised. Enter Simple spool system for a Mendel (or other 3d printer) by brokentoaster on Thingiverse, a perfect solution.

Printing these parts has revealed that the Y axis is missing steps somehow, leading to slanted prints. Luckily the parts are still usable.

The picture below shows how wonky the prints are coming out, which is a real concern.

Despite this, the spool holder works really well and now we can leave prints unattended. The only criticism would be that it does not fit the spool that our PLA was supplied on, so we had to wind the PLA onto this spool holder by hand.