Save Model Only (Mikey)

This node lives in the pack's Model Merging category, next to Mikey's ModelMerge* nodes, and it solves a specific annoyance from that world: ComfyUI's standard checkpoint-save node bundles model, CLIP, and VAE together, but when you're merging models you don't always want to also bundle a CLIP - especially since the two checkpoints you merged might have had slightly different CLIP versions, and baking a mismatched or stale CLIP into your merged result is a quiet way to make the output worse without any obvious error telling you why. Checkpoint Save Model Only just leaves CLIP out entirely.

It's a save node, not a passthrough - there's nothing downstream of it in the graph. You feed it a model and a vae, set a filename_prefix (default checkpoints/ComfyUI), and it writes a checkpoint file to disk containing just those two components. No CLIP.

The inputs that matter: model is whatever you've been working with - typically the output of a model-merge chain. vae is the VAE you want bundled with it (worth double-checking this is actually the VAE you intend, since a merge workflow can easily have more than one VAE floating around the graph by the time you reach this node). filename_prefix controls where and under what name the file lands - the default already nests it under a checkpoints/ subfolder, and it's worth keeping your prefix inside your actual models/checkpoints directory tree so ComfyUI can find the result again on next launch without you having to move it manually.

Installing it

Comes with the full Mikey Nodes pack. Through ComfyUI Manager, search "Mikey Nodes." Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/bash-j/mikey_nodes

Restart ComfyUI. No extra models or dependencies needed - it's a file-write operation on components you already have loaded in your graph.

Common issues

The thing to actually watch for: a checkpoint saved without CLIP isn't a drop-in replacement for a full checkpoint everywhere. Some tools and loaders assume a standard model+CLIP+VAE bundle and won't load a CLIP-less file cleanly - if you're planning to share the result outside your own ComfyUI setup, check the receiving tool's expectations first, or be ready to load CLIP separately via a standard CLIPLoader node alongside it when using it yourself. This node is the right call when you know you want a leaner, CLIP-free save (the common case right after a merge), not a general-purpose checkpoint saver.

Also worth a sanity check before running it: since this node sits at the end of a merge chain, make sure the model and vae you're feeding in are actually the final merged versions and not an earlier tap point in the graph - it's an easy wire to get crossed in a complex merging workflow with several intermediate model outputs floating around.