Cabinet and Dolly

Up to now the Creatr has been standing in the work shop but now I'm done with most of the modifications it is ready to move into my office. I have a few simple requirements for this: first of all I need to be able to move the printer out of the way when not being used and second, I want quick access to all my filament colors in order to change the filaments for the extruders easily.

Hanging the filament rolls

One of the main problems to solve is filament feeding. I discovered that too much friction on the rolls may result in the filament tying knot on the roll (where the upper windings get stuck below other windings). The rolls need to turn easily, a bit of searching gave me a bunch of nice bearings.

The blue hubs fit exactly into the larger holes in the rolls of filament from Leapfrog or RepRapWorld that I have and the red axle endings give support to the axle in my cabinet to be.

This almost looks like real production.
The red axle pieces are printed with a thicker outer skin to allow tapping M8 threads to accept the M8 threaded rods.

At the top right of the photo you'll see a red axle piece with an M8 bolt and nut with a large washer. I used this to push the bearings into the blue hubs.

My filament rolls. The two larger ones on the right are 2 kg rolls and I bought those with the idea that this would be my main material colors. I decided not to store the 2 kg rolls in my supply cabinet and for the white filament I already created a new 1 kg size spool.

All rolls now have the hubs with ball bearings. Time to create a supply cabinet to store all these rolls.

A bit of tinkering about a good cabinet for all my colors was not too difficult to design: If I place the cabinet left or right of the Creatr, then I can put 4 rolls next to each other and 3 on top of each other.
The first quick CAD 3D drawings showed a cabinet with all solid walls but that did not look to nice so I added some cut outs. An easy job for my CNC milling machine.

O boy ... I should have remembered that I need to sand and paint this at least twice to get a proper finish.

The little square U shaped blocks are already glued on top of the walls. These blocks will support the rolls.

Getting there

A dolly with printer and supply cabinet on top. Still not finished though; I need some way of feeding the filament to the extruder.

Something to build next.