Filament spool placement for direct extruder printer

Lets talk about filament spool placement for direct extruder printers. It is clear that with bowden extruder a spool can be put away next to the extruder. But what about direct drive ones? It seems that tried and tested method is right above the printhead. But recently I have seen more and more professional printers (yesterday ones from GermanRepRap) that have spools mounted at the bottom of the printers. There seems to be a long PTFE tubing between the spool and the extruder. Anyone can talk from the experience how well this work?

As long as the path is smooth it shouldn't matter where the roll is. Mine is directly above and it does make it nice for filament swaps.

I like this idea very much. I use wade's extruder and with this you never have to store your filament any more







specially the ones that us the tubes
I don't know if this will work with 3mm filament

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/08/2016 02:24PM by amigob.