Okay, here's something I'm starting to work on.
I found a design on Thingiverse for a printable bulk loader, a clone of a Lloyd. It takes a standard 30.3 m (100 ft.) bulk roll, has a light tight (add your own felt) passage for the film and a light tight hatch and crank, along with using a simple "count the turns" like the commercial ones to determine how many frames are loaded (30 turns for 36 frames, all the way down to 15 turns for 12 frames, IIRC). It'll print on nearly any so-called "medium format" 3D printer, and according to Cura Slicer has a good bit of room to spare on the build plate of my Ender 3.
I want to "remix" the design by expanding the film chamber to accept a 400 foot (122 m) cine roll. I found a
PDF that gives the core or spool types and dimensions for cine rolled films, and apparently the only choice ever seen on 400 foot rolls of 35mm is the same core we usually see in our 100 foot bulk rolls -- a plastic core with two inch O.D. and one inch I.D. (camera spools are only ever seen on 100 foot rolls). That means I only need to expand the diameter of the film chamber in the Lloyd loader clone to be large enough to accept the larger film roll, and my calculation (based on 7 mil total film thickness) indicates the roll should be just under six inches diameter -- so allowing a chamber diameter of 6.5 inches should give plenty of tolerance.
And
that means I ought to still be able to (just) fit the expanded main body of the loader (and the enlarged lid, of course) onto the 235 x 235 mm build plate of my printer. Which in turn means that instead of having to search eBay for months or longer in order to pay a collector's item price for one of the seemingly rare bulk loaders that take a 400 foot roll, I can spend some spare time redesigning two parts of an existing design, and a couple days printing those parts with no more than about $10 worth of filament -- and be able to buy Vision3 or 5222 film on the longer rolls and either save a bunch of bucks compared to buying these films already loaded for 35mm still cameras, or actually be able to resell the film in standard cassettes at a significant profit. And if I need a second such loader, all it costs is filament and machine time after the design work is done for the first one.
Stuff like this is why I've wanted a 3D printer since they used metal powder and a laser that cost more than a new Bentley (not even counting the CNC setup to steer it). With them costing less than a pair of tires now, anything I can download files for or design myself, and weighs less than a couple ounces in plastic, might as well be free.