(06) Final Coaster Fabrication

    I decided to fully commit to my spinner idea in the end. I engraved circles into the bearing caps to provide better grip and a more interesting tactile experience when interacting with the coaster. I think overall it came out how I planned it to. A lot of my numbers came down to guess-work and I was lucky enough that all of my measurements turned out to be correct. My biggest issue though was the rod that was going to go inside of the bearing to reduce friction of the caps had fallen through the laser cutter grate both times and I couldn't recover them. I tried to improvise a solution through using tape and toothpciks to suspend the caps just above the edges of the bearing, but this didn't work as well as I had hoped, nor was it very permanent. One of the elements of my design that I had erased from my initial concepts were the weights on the edges of the spinner. I thought it would be best to simply my design as I had not worked with this sort of material before and wanted to focus on just getting the spinning mechanism functional. This turned out to hinder the amount of time my coaster stays spinning. It isn't a big deal but seeing where I could've fixed things does bother me a bit.

    The coaster lays flat exactly as I planned it to which was a big relief for me. Spinners often have their bearing caps sit above the bulk of the material, and therefore doesn't provide a stable surface. My way to change that to turn this into a coaster was to make the body of the spinner thicker than the bearing by 1/16th of an inch on each side so that my caps can sit flush with the rest of the wood. This turned out to work far better than I expected. Having to work in a mixture of milimitres and inches for this threw off my numbers quite a lot, but in the end it all worked out.