I have a collection of sample filament. It’s a little vintage, iht some being from Faberdashery, one of the multi colour and transparent sample filament packs. These are great fun, allowing you to try many colours.

Faberdashery are sadly no longer around. The filament, all PLA, has largely been kept in airtight bags so should not have absorbed too much moisture. these filament sa re short 15 meter coils, and not on a spool.

One problem I ran into was putting them on spools suitable for my current printer. My current 3D printer is Bambulabs A1 Mini, with an AMS Lite. For the AMS lite to work properly, it needs the filament on a spool, so the AMS can retract it and cut the filament during colour changes.

I tried a few solutions. First, you will need an empty filament spool. Always keep a few of these, as they will be handy for this and I’m sure I’ll find other uses.

• Just wrapping the filament on the spool will cause it to uncoil, and loose filament cannot be wound back on by the AMS motors.
• I tried using a bend in the filament to hook around one of the holes in the spool. This worked for about 10 minutes, but then slipped out and the filament unwound.
• I’m currently using a small bit of duct tape, which seems to be holding.

Be careful only to wind the same way the filament was wound when shipped. I have accidentally spooled filament the wrong way, before for a large roll of “natural” white PLA, and overnight, there was a horrid cracking sound. The next morning, the filament had shattered! I had to throw it away - no length was more than about 3 cm.

Using a drill and Lego to wind filament

A few years back, I needed to spool a lot of filament onto a spool that fit a printer from a tiny cartridge type spool. This video shows how I did that.