Made this a little while back for my daughter, but it took my a long time to edit together all of the media.
This is an aluminum fidget spinner I made with a ceramic ball bearing. I actually made two… one with 3 “wings” and one with 2 “wings”
It’s well past the curve of popularity, but should anyone want them, I made the files available for free on my website ( chopbangbuzz.com )
Here are the basics of what went into it:
First I designed it all up in Fusion 360 and used Fusion’s CAM package to create all of the GCode and preview the simulation:
Here is the layed out drawing of the fidget spinner (for the fun of it).
I cut some aluminum stock I had laying around down to a size that would fit in my vise.
Cutting it with a bandsaw, especially with the repetition and backing out/in for a better cut, meant I needed to clean up the cut edge quite a bit. I ended up clamping it to the end of my CNC table vertically, and squaring it up as best I could. It was the only way I could get the clearance needed to do this part of the milling:
Then I just slapped it in my vise and ran the GCode:
You can see it taking shape here. I noticed in the beginning it was cutting way better than this point, where it started doing more “pushing” of the aluminum. I attribute this to a variety of factors, but especially too shallow of cuts, and running my spindle (router) too slowly, leaving it under powered.
I found an affordable engraver! It actually works really well and is super easy to use. it’s almost magical watching it engrave quickly. I’ve already done some other custom stuff for people who wanted engraved keychains etc.
A flip and… well, the same as before!
Final engrave on the other side. You can see how the end result looks compared to the fusion preview.
I glued the ceramic bearing in with CA (super) glue, which seemed to work really well. It was a fairly tight fit so the glue used needed to be super thin. I don’t think I can bring my machine within the tolerances needed to try the “freeze” method of bearing fitting.
My daughter seemed to really like it… and then asked me to make her friend one (which is why I ended up doing the 2-wing version… hate doing the same thing twice)
Anyways, as I said, the files are all freely available on my site: chopbangbuzz.com, and here’s a fun little video of the whole process:
Hope you like!
