The Problem

The refill filament of Bambu Lab comes without spool, and the box it comes in is therefore not very big. Once you put the refill on a spool, you cannot store it anymore in the box it came with. The refill filament comes with a label that you can put on the spool, but it only says “PLA Basic” or “PLA Matte” but not which color it is. I care about the correct name of the color, as it is sometimes not very clear if this color you see (Yellow) is “lemon yellow" “submarine yellow” or “a sunset on an empty southern beach beige”. And this information gets lost if you cannot somehow put the correct name on the spool or a storage solution.

After browsing different spool storage solutions here (printed boxes with sample cards, tags to put on the spool,…) I did not find anything to my taste. In the end it was bothering me, that either a printed box would need a wasteful amount of filament or in other solutions I would store the spools outside a box, which somehow is messy for me right now (I have no storage that is suitable to put spools in).

The solution

So the solution for me was to re-use empty spool boxes from other manufacturers (like 3dJake) that are big enough to contain the whole Bambu Lab Spool. But how to mark those, to not lose the correct color name? I just cut out the (complete) name tag from the refill box (77mm x 57mm x 1mm) and put it onto the re-used box, such that it covers old information about color and filament. So I designed this label holder, with pins to put through the new card box, that allows to carry the cut out card box label from the Bambu Refill Box.

I started with a design that already contains the pins, I thought it may be cumbersome to print, but it was not working that badly.

But nevertheless I thought it would be a more 3d printer friendly design if I separated that label holder from the pins. This is the second version I provide, with two individual stl's – one for the label holder, one for the pins. Note that I changed the pins a bit compared to the “complete” solution, as those may be a bit wide.

It may be that you have some other pins lying around that you would prefer to use, and that they just do not fit in the prepared cavity of the tag holder – just adapt the source file of the tag holder, I put all my FreeCAD source files there as well. FreeCAD is open source and available for all major platforms.

Printing:

I printed the tag holder in an upright position, as suggested by the “auto orientation” function of Bambu Studio. In case of the “complete” model I used tree support, in the other case I did not use any support and it was not necessary. In both versions there was a large brim added by Bambu Studio and I think it was justified.

For the pins support may be deadly, as removing support is difficult without breaking something off, and it prints fine without support.

Applying the Tag to another Box:

First you should cut out the desired label from the refill box – I disassemble it or unfold it and then cut out around the label.

Then put the naked tag holder onto the other box, try to hide as much of the wrong information that may still be on the box as possible. If you use tag holder with the holes in it, mark the position of those on the box. If you are fancy you can use some drill to put a small hole in it, 3mm would be a target point. I mostly just use something with a sharp end to pinch a small hole in it and enlarge it until I can press the pin in, so I do not know which diameter is really needed…

Afterwards just slide the cut out tag into the the tag holder. If the spool is empty, keep the spool and the box, remove the tag and put another one in there for the follow up spool.