Fidget Spinner Design and Creation
The fidget spinner is my favorite thing that I have made this year. Fidget spinners are a popular, little gadget that people can hold in one hand to play with. You can find one pretty much anywhere for about $5-$20. For my third project though, we got to make our own. I chose to make one for myself, and also have something to do with volleyball. I have been playing volleyball since junior high and it is still my favorite activity to do, so I thought, "What would be better than to add volleyball's to a fidget spinner?" The process was very easy, yet I still learned a lot while making it. Most of the work I had to do was in solidworks because I 3D printed the actual fidget spinner.
​
I had to use a lot of features in solidworks that I had not yet learned, so this design helped me work/navigate solidworks better. After I finished my design of the base (as pictured above), I sent it to the 3D printer and let it print. I had already bought a fidget spinner from the school book store that I was going to take the bearings out of and use them for my new spinner.
​
After that I started working on the volleyball caps to put in the three outside holes. This was the most difficult part of the whole process because I could not figure out how to make the lines in the volleyball. I finally figured it out, I had to make three very small rectangles, that almost looked like lines, then extrude cut them from the circle so they would be visible when I printed them. Then I made the base of the volleyball by extruding a smaller circle out of the bottom and then drawing an even smaller circle inside that to extrude cut it. This base is where the cap fits into the each bearing in all 3 outer circles of the spinner.
Overall, my fidget spinner turned out well. The base of the caps ended up being slightly too big in diameter after I 3D printed them, which was easy to fix. All I had to do was file it down around the edes and they ended up fitting inside perfectly.
