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One thing I have learned in the 3D community is people are always printing products to benefit them and their machines. What upgrades can you make to ensure better prints? I was having some difficulties with some filament wanting to tighten up on itself when trying to be used so I started searching for better ways to house my filament while in use. My other printer has a more upright approach to feeding the filament and I have never ran into any issues with the spool feeding out smoothly and not getting caught up.  So off to one of my favorite locations to look for files www.thingiverse.com . After just a few minutes of surfing I found the perfect design! It was easily adjustable for the different widths of filament spools that I use. So in this tutorial I will walk you thru start to finish of my new filament holder.

So lets get started! Hop on over to: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2047554  and download this file. This is the file we will be working on today! Don’t forget to unzip your file to have it ready for use.  While you are there make sure to make you an account and start creating some collections of things you may want to print in the future.  And consider joining my group there where I will link designs I have collected and successfully printed and where I will also be adding any designs that I create for your use. You will also be able to share your creations with others as well! https://www.thingiverse.com/groups/silhouette-alta-community Here is the design we will be making today!

First thing you will see when you attempt to open a file that is larger than the Alta platform is “Model is to large for the printer bed. Would you like to resize the model to fit?” My rule of thumb is to always tell it no. This gives you the opportunity to scale it to what you want it to be.

Once it  has been opened you will want to select the design and make sure the bounding box is around it meaning you are editing this design. Go to the top of the page and where it defaults to dimensions you will see an arrow if you click on that it will bring you up more options including scale. Once you have scale selected you should notice the lock is locked meaning it will scale evenly. In the first box for this design we will type in 97. Meaning it will scale it down to 97% of the original design.

This is just enough to still fit on the bed of the machine and not alter this design enough to hurt the use of the design.

To complete your project you are going to want to print out 4 of these designs each print took me about an hour. I printed on standard quality, using the red silhouette filament, you will also need some super glue, clamps, and 4 – 608 bearings.  You can find the 608 bearings at local skateboard shops if you have any but me personally I ordered mine from Amazon because I didn’t want to run all over looking for them. Click here for a link to 608 Bearings