Moving back to plastic spools

**THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO PROTOPASTA SPOOLS, They are a surprisingly strong cardboard and work fine in the AMS**

From the next batch onwards (march 16th) all new filament ordered will be on Plastic spools.

With the rise of the AMS and other multi material systems, cardboard spools have an obvious pitfall... They aren't strong enough to survive shipping and sometimes the spools can fall apart.

The filament sold is MINT and now the only thing filling my emails is broken spools and spools issues as well as damaged rims and AMS questions.

In a bid to curve all these issues, Plastic is the way forward.

To reduce the impact of going back to plastic, the spools will not come in a retail box, instead they will packed into a custom sized box depending on your order. So instead of 10 boxes of filament and a external box. you will now get just 1 box with 10 loose rolls inside, this helps reduce the shipping weight as each empty retail box weights around 175grams. Thats a 1.75kg saving on 10 roll orders. This savings in last mile shipping will help pay the extra 80c a spool the plastic costs over the cardboard.

Think about it this way, lets say you as a customer order 10 rolls of filament, you get 10 rolls, 10 vacuum bags and 10 individual boxes and another big box holding all 10 rolls, this weights about 13kg.

Now lets say you open the box and find one CARDBOARD spool crushed and falling apart, you open the spool and it opens up and drops your new filament on the floor. Congratulations you just dropped 1kg of PLASTIC and wasted the 300 grams of packaging. thats 1.3kg of plastic wasted pretty much, Then I have to send you a refund or a replacement, if I send a replacement it will cost me the cost price of 2 spools and the shipping fee, if I pay the 80c extra and get plastic spools I save myself 60$ on a broken cardboard spool when it comes in for an RMA.

Now if that was my new plastic spool, you'd get 10 rolls, 10 vacuum bags and 1 box. weighting approximately 11.25kg. Now with plastic spools, they are more durable against impacts so you will find almost no crushed or broken plastic spools in any order. This will save time and money during transit to you as a customer and me as the packer.

The plastic spools can be reused to reel cables, they can be turned into organizers or recycled. Yes its much harder to recycle plastic then cardboard, but in general the plastic spools will end up working out to a better customer experience and they will provide more reliable printing.

I WILL NOT BE DOING REFILL SPOOLS, contrary to popular belief, refill spools cost more to make then normal spools and they usually have a higher fail rate during production. On a batch of 50 spools, 2 spools are always discarded, the first 1 to get the machine going and the last one to purge the machine. With refill spools usually 2 more kg per 50kg get wasted as the workers putting in the cardboard core and zip ties can sometimes drop the spool, rendering it useless.

Not only that, it takes more time for the workers to zip tie and undo the clamps so the refill ends up costing 10cents more then a prespooled roll of filament. so at the factory 4kg out of 50 are already wasted. Now if you follow any bambu group you will see sometimes refill spools fall apart. lets say you bought a refill spool from me. you go to put it on your spool and it falls apart, congrats once again, you just wasted a refill spool and sent 1kg to the tip. the shipping fee, the packaging and all that is rendered useless and it will cost more to replace instead of tanking it and using 175g for a plastic spool from the start of production.

I hope that all makes sense.

TLDR 
I'm going plastic cause its cooler and better

I'm not doing refill spools cause they can lead to more waste then a spool already on plastic!