I have quite a few old - but sealed and unopened so should be usable - ABS spools by “Octave” that I want to use, but they appear to be about 97 or 98mm between the two outside surfaces! It’s not clear if any of the respooler designs can handle transferring from spools this wide! I thought I had found one but it was 95mm side to side. I believe what was Octave is now Profound3D but I don’t know if Profound3D’s filament spools are the same size as the old Octave ones, so it may be a spool width that is just never used nowadays that no-one has thought to accommodate. Does anyone know of any rewinder designs that can handle these wide spools? (preferably without too many non-printed parts but I do have several cheap low quality 608 bearings somewhere, left over from an ancient 3D printer build, when I replaced these cheap ones (that are probably good enough for rolling spools over) with better quality bearings…)
Just hang it on a broom stick with a sock to provide some friction somewhere and use this receiver 
Fully printable except for a section of PTFE tube.
Also check V-Spooler X by Fyrby Additive MakerWorld: Download Free 3D Models
He was selling printed and assembled versions on Etsy.
I’m using that too and it works perfectly. That is also one of the respoolers that needs the least filament. I don’t want to use a whole spool of filament to print something that will be used to respool 3 spools.
I went for the version with actual ball bearings. But seems the printed bearings work too.
Thanks for the Pasta Lite suggestion everyone. So would one of those (which is effectively the back half of the Pastamatic) plus an off-the-shelf rolling holder such as from Amazon.com (or a home-made equivalent) be the way to go, or is any old thing sticking out sideways good enough, and a smoothly rolling source really isn’t important? I’m sure I could cobble something together made out of some PVC plumbing pipe quite easily. Come to think of it I even have a plastic spool holder tube from the back of my old Makerbot clone that would be ideal if I could mount it to something. OK, I think I know what I need to do now, thanks everyone.
I would go the pipe route. You want a bit of friction on the original spool, so that it slows down by itself.
It is not easy to keep speed absolutely constant and without friction it can unwind due to inertia. And you also need to slow down at the end.
Thanks. To be honest I’m not really understanding the issues yet but I’m sure it’ll become obvious what you mean after a bit of experience. I have some short length leftovers that I’m practising with right now. So far the problems have been pretty basic, such as how to get it started (I ended up using a small piece of draughting tape, not so much that it’ll not break away when the printer hits the end of the spool) and what to do as the last bit of filament goes through and everything springs loose (which looks like I just need to slow down at the end of the transfer and put a finger on the filament as it ends, which might be what you’re talking about?). I’ll transfer these leftovers a few more times until I feel I’ve got the hang of it then I’ll try printing with them. I did get a nasty tangle the second time I transferred from one spool to the other but now that I’ve had a little practice that’s not happening any more. I can see myself using one of my old Octave spools soon. Or at least as soon as I get a dryer going… (they’re very old spools, but I have too many of them to just throw away). By the way I printed the Pasta Lite donor spinner and it seems to work just fine. I wasn’t aware of it when I posted because I’d only seen the full pastamatic at that point and it was width-limited. The horizontal one for the Pasta Lite doesn’t have that limitation.
One other thing to note is that ABS has a lower mass density compared to PLA and PETG so 1kg of it really fills the Bambu spools to the edges. If you are splitting a big spool into multiple smaller ones, I would just aim for 900g or 850g per spool to make it easy, or re-respool to get a nicer wind
Thanks. btw I’m owe you a Boost token as soon as I have some again. That’s an impressive device. So… I had two goals that I wanted a respooler for; I had one roll of Bambu PLA where the Bambu spool had come apart. Bambu were kind enough to replace it but it seemed a shame to have to throw away the unspooled one so I used the replacement filament to build your Pasta Lite and was finally able to salvage the damaged spool this afternoon. Though having transferred an entire spool with the hand crank I can see now why people use electric drills. And then there were five full 1Kg spools of old (from around Y2K) Octave filament that didn’t physically fit in the AMS being almost 10cm wide. Actually one of them was an old version of TPU and fell apart just now when I opened the package - beyond any rescue with a dryer - but there are still 4 good red/green/black/white spools of ABS which I’ll be putting on to spare Bambu spools Real Soon Now. But if you recommend spooling twice to eliminate any tension from the 90 degree twist I might wait a bit until I hook up a motor! (I have a spare spindle from an upgraded 3018 that I can control from a manual speed controller that will let me run it slower than my electric drill that only has two settings - ‘fast’ and ‘too fast’… I just have to work out the mechanics of mounting it securely so that its the shaft that rotates and not the motor ) But no hurry on the ABS, I have a long wait until the dryer that I ordered is delivered. So I’ve done all I need to do for the moment.
Thanks! And the 90 deg twist isn’t the problem, it’s the inside of the spool ending up on the outside and visa versa. But I’m not sure whether ABS even has this problem, its often an issue with old PLA.
I think, drying after respooling helps the filament to settle in its new curvature and reduces the tension/ stress.