Makerbot's Deluxe Filament Spindle & Box MK1 Kit

I bought the spindle and box kit along with 5 lbs. of black plastic, and boy is it.. well.. not exactly 'crap' but certainly in need of improvement.  For $100 I was expecting more.

Assembling it was quite tricky, and I accidentally split some of the fragile plywood where the teeth from  one side socket into the holes in another.  If anyone else is building one of these I recommend that you spend some time sanding down the teeth so that the fit more easily.

The free spinning spindle was an issue while I was doing some test prints, trying to get my Skeinforge settings dialed in.  The plastic went underneath and snagged on the axle hardware.  There's no way to keep it from going underneath, and if you want to back the spindle up there's only a tiny hole at the very back that you have to try and wedge your fingers into to turn the spindle a few degrees at a time.  Madness!

So I've made a few modifications...

I cut small squares out of an old foam camping mattress pad and stuck them to the bottom of the spindle with double sided tape.  Then I used washers on the bolts that hold the spindle in the box to adjust how much they were pressing into the bottom of the box, so that the spindle could still rotate fairly easily but not just freewheel the way it had been.  Hopefully the foam can help keep the plastic out from under as well.

I also remove the front plastic face plate, to make it much, much easier to rotate the spindle backwards.  The plastic isn't quite as well protected from dust and such, but so far that has never been a big issue for me.. certainly not as big an issue as not being able to rotate the spindle.

Now I can get back to dialing in my Skeinforge settings.