With fidget spinners being all the rage now, especially in the 3D printing community, we decided to make our own! A desktop CNC machine is an awesome machine to make fidget spinners from, especially since you can use a wide variety of materials with a nearly infinite number of designs. This spinner was a fairly simple design, drawn on Onshape and made from a piece of scrap wood. We used three 608ZZ bearings, commonly used in skateboards and scooters, to act as weight and provide smooth motion for rotation.
Since we didn’t have 8mm thick material, we had to cut a layer off of the scrap wood to bring it down from 15.75mm to 8mm, You can see that the first half of the milling operation is just cutting away at the wood.
We started off with using carpet tape, but we found that the workpiece would shift slightly near the end of the operation, so we started again with hot glue instead. You can check out some other workholding options here: https://sienci.com/workholding-options/. Hot glue worked beautifully and held the wood on the bed without any issues.
After completing the milling operation and taking the spinner body off the bed, I tried fitting the bearings in. While they fit perfectly, a combination of the burrs and starting the bearings in at the wrong angle caused the wood to crack. I believe the wood we were using was spruce, which was quite light and easy to break. If you choose to make a fidget spinner for yourself, use a harder wood and make sure to clean the burrs out before fitting the bearings.
Overall we were pretty happy with the results, especially as our first attempt at making a fidget spinner. Stay tuned for more projects!
Feeds and speeds:
1/4″ 2 flute upcut bit at 16,000RPM
Feedrate: 700mm/min
Depth of cut: 2mm