For your printing pleasure, I present to you these handy-dandy adapters for small spools!  

Some filament such as Sunlu and other generic brands that sell the 200g or 250g spools sell the filament on spools that have a smaller ID than can fit on the AMS Lite cones.   Sure, you can pop the cones off and just let the spools ride on the bare shafts, but half of the time the spools fall off.  Sad panda :(  

I went a goggling about over Maker World, Thangs, and the like to find solutions to this problem.  I found several that slip over the AMS Lite cones and have a reduced section that sticks out into the next county to hold these smaller spools.  I printed one that needed glued together and was saddened.  It took 100g of filament and then caused the filament to be stressed feeding into the AMS Lite.  Not good enough.  Nothing simply replaced the cone with a reduced ID to fit the smaller spools.  Weird. 

I had an idea… it would be awesome to have adapters for smaller spools that allowed the use of the same tab retention method of the stock cones, didn't stress the filament by putting the spool in a different time zone, didn't burn a lot of filament, doesn't need supports when printing, can have a full set printed on the A1 Mini at once, and was free.

So that's what I did, and here they are.

I went through several revisions and tests before uploading.  There were several rounds of tab revisions for both orange hex and green rectangle styles until I was satisfied.  These designs have a gratifying engaged feel.  They don't easily pop off.  Yet a gentle tug (much less than the stock cones) will pull them off.  The tab areas have shaped bases that correspond with the AMS Lite cones so you can't install it at the wrong location (poka-yoke... tee hee).  The shaped bases also provide good support for the tabs allowing for just the right amount of stiffness for engagement without being too stiff or too weak.  The adapters have a slip fit bore to ride nicely on the AMS shafts.  The outer bore allows for a millimeter or two of wiggle room with the small spools so they aren't clunking around.  

Note: you may have to clip the small filament tail off inside the spool bore.  You know, that little piece that locks the end of the filament to the spool.

Oh, I also have tab test files uploaded so you can check fitment without printing the whole adapters.

Print settings:

Material: PLA (it works fine!)

Layer height: .2

First layer: .2

wall loops: 3

top and bottom layers: 4

infill: doesn't matter because there should be almost none with these settings

Temps, speeds, etc: Default .2 layer height and Generic PLA settings for the A1 Mini is what I used.

These take about 25g of filament each and roughly an hour each using the stock A1 Mini speed settings.