Introducing the Hawke Snapmaker 2.0 Filament Perch!

Frustrated by the provided filament mount on the A350, I set out to design a new mount. Behold the Hawke Snapmaker 2.0 Filament Perch!

And there was much rejoicing. :smiley:

Seriously, though. The way that the A350 tangled filament by lowering and raising the print head was driving me crazy. I felt like I had to babysit every print and hand-wind the filament back onto the spool whenever the print head went ā€œhome.ā€

Instead, I used some leftover parts from a previous project and designed a filament mount that rides on the horizontal bar. I wanted it to sit close to the center of gravity of the bar to reduce the likelihood that it would effect printing, and I wanted it to be printable with defaults and without any supports or post-processing, though it does require some parts to be purchased.

And despite my faux fanfare, it works beautifully… even better than I expected. It fits any size spool without futzing or ā€œinstallation.ā€ It feeds the filament smoothly. The filament itself turns the spool left and right as the head moves. No need for filament guides or spring-loaded filament mounts.

Simple and effective. My favorite kind of solution!

Adam

Here’s the part at Thingiverse. Cat tax included.

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Very interesting! Excellent documentation and very helpful.

In your video I don’t see an enclosure and I wonder if feeding filament from the centre of the top of the enclosure might also be a way of solving the issues you describe in your Thingiverse description.

@ahawkes
Props man, that looks great! Do you have any issues with the spool wondering (its a common problem with flat roller spool holders)? And I love the swivle design I would have never thought of that.

Truly great! Can’t wait to try it out. (Maybe with some mods so I have to buy less stuff because I’m cheap)

The spool will wander, but it doesn’t matter. It just keeps happily dispensing away, even if it reaches one side or the other of the perch. If you start with the spool in the middle, however, it’s not likely to wander very far.

You could certainly start saving on parts by creating your own clevis pin using the printer. I considered that but didn’t want to delay release!

Other than that, I suppose you could print your own ā€œbearingsā€ by making wheels, but I was using existing parts and dod NOT want to introduce any more friction than I had to.

Let me know if you end up printing one. I’d love to see it.

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I don’t have an enclosure for my A350. I didn’t buy one because I never even took my Snapmaker 1.0 enclosure out of its box. /shrug

If I end up getting an enclosure, I’ll probably just make a new version of the perch by shifting it backward and down behind the horizontal bar. Unfortunately, there are limits to how far down I can shift it, but based on how high the original filament holder is, I bet it’ll work out.

Nice work! I can see many people wanting one of those.

I’m glad to see that they fixed the Z axis weight issue with v2. v1 is very limited in the amount of weight the Z axis can carry.

I’m not sure how much the 1.0 can carry, but I believed that the print head data cable would be in the way unless I find a longer replacement and reroute it. It is nice that the A250 and A350 have two vertical stepper motor columns. Makes them much more robust!

I wouldn’t print the bearings either, I have tried that in the past and it never turns out as well as I would like. But the pin and roller bars could be printed