Spool Lift for PONNOR Thermal Label Holder

I have a Rollo thermal printer to print shipping labels for work. I bought a cheap stand that keeps my stack of fan-fold 4x6 labels from sliding around. Here's the one I bought from Amazon (PONNOR brand).

I've recently started using it for custom branded stickers that I load on the spool holder. I got annoyed real quick that I had to remove the stack of fan-fold labels every time I wanted to load up a spool - the spool would hit the stack of shipping labels if I didn't remove them entirely.

I decided to make a “lift kit” that moved the spool up and out of the way so that I wouldn't have to remove the fan-fold labels when loading a roll on the spool holder. I also made the new spool crossbar be a pivoting arm so that it's super duper easy to load up a spool. Hopefully the annotated image shows how to use it.

I designed this around prototyping hardware I had on hand, but I bet you can riff on it with whatever you've got.

• 4x thread-forming M3 FHCS (McMaster link)
  • You use 2x per side to attach the “lift arms” to the static crossbrace
  • You could probably just use a normal M3 FHCS and drive it into place, but I haven't tried
  • I think there's also enough material to drop some M3 heat-set inserts into the static crossbar, but you'd have to enlarge the holes first
• 1x thread-forming M3 BHCS (McMaster link)
  • This is the world's laziest pivot
  • I originally planned on using a normal M3 SHCS, but I reached for this thread-forming BHCS instead
  • You drive this into place to trap the swing arm into the lift arm that has a hole
  • Quick note - the swing arm technically has a gentle radius on it… it's actually really hard to tell in real life so you can probably install it however you want… but it's intended to be radius-side-up so that it's tangent to the spool core ID

You need a couple supports on the static crossbar, but that's it. I printed everything in PLA with a buncha walls and infill to make it stiff.

This could absolutely be better, but R01 is good enough and we're calling it done. Enjoy!