The Master Spool (less plastic waste)

I want to give something back to the Hive community with my posts. Beneficiary for this post is @kvinna.

Hello dear 3D printing Hivians,

today I want to introduce you guys to the Master Spool and the idea behind it.

While I am (as most people) against unneccessary plastic waste, I found myself stretching that statement to its very limits when I started 3D printing.
I found myself printing failures more often than successfull prints in the beginning, which produced a lot of plastic waste already. When my filament was all used up, I was left with a big empty spool made from plastic and ordered a new spool.
Over time, this would inevitably lead to lots and lots of plastic spool waste.

After using up several spools I stumbled upon the following youtube video by Richard Horne:

In this video he proposes that instead of using a new spool everytime, we could just print a "Master Spool" that can be reused. This would come in very handy, as everyone would be able to print it themselves.

This is what the concept of the Master Spool looks like:

As you can see, the idea was that you can just screw the two parts together.

The only problem was, that filament producers would need to adapt to this idea, otherwise his good intentions would be in vain. The filament needed to be packed in a way that it fits onto this new master spool, and we all know that a filament spool that is not wrapped properly can cause big problems when printing. So the quality had to be on pont, otherwise it made no sense.

Suprisingly, one filament producer almost immediately got back to him and transformed his idea into a reality.

This is what a filament package for the master spool looks like:

And this is what it looks like on the master spool:

I printed 3 in total for my most commonly used colours: Black, White and Grey:

Until now, the Master Spool has never failed me, there were no problems with the wrapping of the filament. I am not an expert and not using too large amounts of filament though, so maybe this is not useful when you are usually using very big spools.

I hope I could something you did not already know. If you want to print it for yourselves, here is the link to thingiverse.