tangled spool ever ruin your day?

[danrodz]

I ended up ruining two prints today because of a tangled spool of PLA. One was a 5 hour print, the spool snagged around halfway while I was doing laundry in the basement. I didn't even notice it until the print was almost done. The second happened the same way, about halfway through the print it snagged while I was doing other things in the house. How do you folks deal with this? I tried respooling and it's a total mess now.

One positive note, I experimented a little with some nylon weed whacker line. I have a roll of 2.7mm red line and loaded it up. I set the nozzle for 235C and reduced the travel rate in slic3r. I ran the hollow test cube, the cube delaminated in two spots. I'm going to try running the nozzle a bit slower and see if that helps.

[printbus]

I ended up ruining two prints today because of a tangled spool of PLA. One was a 5 hour print, the spool snagged around halfway while I was doing laundry in the basement. I didn't even notice it until the print was almost done. The second happened the same way, about halfway through the print it snagged while I was doing other things in the house. How do you folks deal with this? I tried respooling and it's a total mess now.

Just like with a spool of wire, I try to never let the free end of the filament loose as my way to prevent tangles. Off the printer, the filament end is always clipped to the spool. On the printer, my spool mount involves a rod across the top of the printer (see avatar), and I have springs and set screw collars on each side of the spool that I can use to adjust tension. Just enough pressure to keep the spool from unwinding itself, yet not enough pressure to hinder the extruder drawing the filament in. It's worked so far... I'm convinced that bearings on a spool mount are not a good idea because of the tendency of spools to want to unravel as you get to the end of the roll.