Expandable Sleeve for Ankermake M5 - Spoolholder - Expanding Mandrel

After printing Drekenthai HieloRey's Expanding Mandrel, I realized I had a lot of filament spools that have an inner diameter of around 73mm. Those spools tended to “walk” on the Expanding Mandrel and rather than risk having them fall off or requiring removal of the Expanding Mandrel every time I used these spools, I decided to make an expandable sleeve that would be able to tightly fit those spools to the Expanding Mandrel.

To create this design, I took the original design of the Front Shim (Knob) from the original design to maintain design integrity with the new part. I tinkered around with it a bit to make it flexible enough to adapt to the Expanding Mandrel and the spool while holding the spool as tight as the original model on a more normal sized spool.

The inner diameter of the Expandable Sleeve is 57mm and the outer diameter of the spool-holding portion is 73mm. The Expandable Sleeve is quite flexible using PLA+ (the only material I tested it with), so it should be capable of accommodating a spool having an inner diameter of roughly 69-77mm, give or take a mm.

I printed this vertically with the large grip end on the bed using a brim. On an earlier design, I tried printing without a brim and one of the segments became dislodged towards the end of the print. On two later variations, I added a brim and the segments stayed in place throughout the entire print.

Thanks to Drekenthai HieloRey for the great original design (and giving me an excuse to try designing in CAD again after a 20+ year break)!

30 January 2023 Update: Added more variations. The original sleeve had an inner diameter of 57mm, an outer diameter of 73mm and a height of 80mm, which took up the entire length of the keys of the Expandable Mandrel. The new variations include shorter versions, including heights of 60mm, 65mm, 70mm, and 75mm. I also included a sleeve with a thinner width (58mm inner diameter and 70mm outer diameter) for other diameter spools.