We are located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA. Humidity is a major issue. So, for more than a decade it has been a major priority for us to find ways to safely store filament in our inventory. Very early, we began sealing opened filament in Filament Vacuum Storage bags and storing them in 5 gallon pain buckets available at local hardware stores.
What we hadn't anticipated was that the introduction of multi-color and multi-head 3D printers would explode the size of our inventory so rapidly! In the past we had loaded a color into a printer and kept using it until it was gone. But, now we find ourselves constantly swapping filament with each new project. And, of course, that means being able to find the filament we want as quickly as possible and storing unused filament so that we can find it.
For me, this involves both work and home. At work, we run a Bambu X1C with 2 AMS units, an A1 with an AMS Lite, 2 A1 Mini's and a Snapmaker U1. At home, I run two A1 Mini 3D printers, one having the AMS Lite. In both situations we use multiple 5 Gallon buckets as our primary storage of opened filament. While our filament demands at work are the greatest, even at home, I need eight buckets. Each bucket holds at least five spools of filament.
Up to now we had attempted to use erasable labels on the tops of the 5 gallon buckets.
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| Old Way - Erasble Labels to Locate Filament |
While in theory that seemed like a good idea, in actual practice it was less than desirable. The core issue is just how difficult it is to write legibly on a recessed label... when you can actually find the marker when you need it. Even if all the buckets have legible labels, it's more than a little effort to read through the list as we search through buckets. It worked. But, barely.
To be honest, we often just used the label to identify the type or make of filament stored; but, not the color. And, that was more of an issue than we thought. At work, for consistency across repeated runs of specific products we have standardized on Bambu filaments. While the RFID in Bambu Spools identifies the type of filament, there is nothing on a Bambu spool identifying the EXACT color. It turns out that it isn't so easy to identify Orange from Pumpkin Orange if you do not have both side-by-side to compare. And, trying to identify transparent colors after-the-fact can be even trickier.
MarsWork ID Tags to the Rescuer!
When we found the Quick-Swap Spools from Marswork, we instantly realized how valuable the ID Tag system would be to us. It would allow use to PRECISELY identify filament Maker, Type and Color in a way we had not been able to do previously.
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| MarsWork ID Tag on MarsWork Spool |
But, it also didn't take us long to realize that these same tags would be useful across our entire inventory. So we designed a 3D printed hub mount for our Bambu spools.
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| Hub Mounting a MarsWork ID Tag for Precise Identify |
We feed our Snapmaker U1 from a Sovol SH03 dryer, so there is no need to remove these hub inserts when mounted. The same is true for the X1C which is fed from two AMS units. For the A1 and A1 mini, we simple pop out the hub insert and keep it right by the printer while that color is loaded.
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| Hub sitting on printer while filament is loaded |
The capability to precisely identify the maker, type and color of every one of our spools of filament would have been an amazing step forward in our workflow. But, MarsWork had one more surprise for us.
The MarsWork Filament Management KIT: A True Game Changer
Shortly after finding the MarsWork Quick-Swap spools and the ID Tag Insert innovation we discovered another gem from Marswork... the Filament Management Kit.
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| Filament Management Kit. |
The kit includes velcro straps, double-side RFID tape, a sheet of self-adhesive "loop" pads and 2 "hook" cards. The latter two groups of items, along with the 3D printed ID tag Inserts available on MakersWorld, have turned out to be extremely important for super-charging our workflow.
Using the Cards & ID Tags to Identify Filament Currently Mounted.
The "hook" cards provide spaces, divided into columns and rows for attaching MarsWork ID Tags using the self-adhesive "loop" pads.
At both Work and Home, we marked one of the cards into sections identifying our 3D printers and dryers. This example shows the home version, having an A1 Mini with AMS-Lite, an A1 Mini (Mono) and a Sunlu Dryer.
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| "In Use" Card Precisely Identifies Filament |
For now, we are leaving the other columns open for future uses that might come to light. For each of the filaments in our inventory, we are printing 6 ID tags. It takes 25-30 minutes per tag set. We have created a special storage box for the un-used tags.
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| 3D Printed Box of MarsWork ID Tags |
Using the Cards & ID Tags to Streamline Our Storage
The real benefits of finding the MarsWork Management Kt came next. It did require our purchasing multiple kits to obtain the number of cards we needed. I am hoping that MarsWork will offer the cards and pads in larger bundles in the future. At home, we needed enough cards to identify and track filaments across 8 buckets.
We have abandoned our erasable label system with a MUCH better solution!
Each card is organized into 4 columns and five rows. Each bucket holds 5 spools of filament. So, the first thing we did is identify each column on a card by it's related bucket.
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| Columns Idenfied by Related Bucket Number |
In the above sample, each column instantly lets us know what is in buckets 2 through 4. This card is updated as filament is removed or added.
We next cut a card into four cards, each having 5 rows. We then replaced the erasable labels on the top of each bucket with one of these cut pieces.
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| Cut "Hook" card column attached to Bucket Top |
Now, not only can we instantly see what is in the bucket much easier than the old label system, we have a second reference immediately available at our desk. There is no ambiguity and the process has become streamlined in a way that was not possible before.
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| Filament Easy Located in Multiple buckets |
It has now become super-fast to find the filament we need. I think it should be obvious that color ID Tags with printed information is a lot easier to and faster to search than hand-written scrawls!
This is just the beginning of discovering how we can streamline our filament handling using the Marswork ID Tag system. As we build our library of tags, I can see it helping us to keep track of unopened new filament inventory and being able to remind us of colors we need to order. In creating new ID tags I came across some colors I had previously used and forgotten high nicely they looked printed.
It would be helpful if MarsWork would expand on their Filament Management System by offering sets that included more master cards and sets of self-adhesive single column cards. I'm extremely pleased with what this system has managed to do for us both at work and at home.
Special Note: The value of the ID Tag System to PRECISELY identify COLOR cannot be overstated. We have already come across filaments we had misidentified because we had not documented the color when it was first opened, The same is true for type and manufacturer in many cases.
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