Seeking ideas for near empty spools. What to do?

Bambu Filament and Accesories Filament
1
What do you do with near-empty spools.
  • I toss spools that are near empty if it’s a filament I don’t use often enough
  • I hold onto everything. You never know when you might need it.
  • I just simply use it till it runs out and then feed in any filament of like kind irrespective of color or brand(i.e. PLA to PLA, PETG to PETG etc.)
  • I splice my spools together.
  • I pull the filament off the spool and toss it to save space but store the filament elsewhere in a lose fashion.
  • Other… Please post below.
0 voters

Most of my utility prints use either black PLA or clear PETG & clear PC.

We’ve all had that situation where you’re down to fewer than let’s say 50g or 5% of the spool. You have a print where perhaps color doesn’t matter but you don’t want to run out of filament in the middle of the print.

So how do you folks deal with partial spools that are down to less than 5% of the spool.

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I print utility things and test parts with nearly empty spools. I have one printed spool that is from 4 different left over spools, one color is only 4 layers thick and can’t really be seen unless you know exactly where to look.

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Why didn’t you put the AMS option in your list?

So far, when I have come close to running out, I have a new spool of an equivalent plastic and color in the AMS and just let it take care of it.

If I had a spool and no plan to get more, I would probably use it for small test parts to use up the rest.

2 Likes
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The AMS allows me to not have left over filament. I only use ABS and eight different colors. So when one gets close i start drying the replacement so its ready to jump in when it goes empty. I also dont print at night anymore.

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Fair question. I assumed there would be options that did not occur to me so that’s what “other” was for.

But even if AMS had occurred to me which it didn’t, how would one phrase AMS as a choice in the context of that poll? The poll was about what to do with near empty spools and one would assume that if one were using AMS, that scenario would be uncommon if at all.

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I just had the scenario today. Lol. I had a small amount of black bambu PLA-CF. I printed something today and I thought I had enough and luckily I did, but I barely had enough.

I have no plans to buy Black PLA-CF or probably any PLA-CF in the foreseeable future. It is too brittle and not very useful to me. I might try one of the other CF plastics that actually benefit structurally from the carbon fiber.

So I put the remaining plastic in a bag and will bring it to a company in my city that makes filament and will recycle filament as well. They don’t pay for it because the process to recycle it is too costly to be profitable if they pay for it.

I need to do my first run to them soon. I have accumulated enough from test parts that I want to get rid of it.

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Yea, I’ll vote for using the AMS so you never run out or have left over bits. Part of the genius of the AMS system I think.

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I keep the refillable spools. Before I throw out any others, I weigh the empty spools so that I can do a bit of maths on my remaining same type rolls to see how much filament is left.