Carousel Spinner

My take on a fidget spinner.

Confession time…in addition to critters, I like carousels. Particularly the antique ones with hand carved wooden horses.

I even have a full-sized carousel horse in a corner of the breakfast area - (Yeah, we had to scale down the table to get it in there, but it’s cheerful, it fits with my “eclectic” decorating style, and visiting children love it.)

This was one of the things I’d planned to make with the laser once I got my own, so I’ve been playing with it on and off for the last couple of weeks, and it’s still a little rough, but it’s coming along, so I thought I’d show it since I’m likely to get side tracked again here pretty quick.

I created the horses from photographs of actual antique carousel horses, including what I think are a couple of Dentzel horses (c. 1900) , and a hippocamp just for fun.

Had some problems with the actual construction, the first design incorporated small neodiddlium magnets to “float” the rotating table for better spin… only it didn’t quite happen that way. The rotation tended to jump from point to point between magnets.

So scratched that and started over.

This one rotates “okay”…I’m actually shooting for the kind of spin that the GF Desktop Tool Carousel enjoys, but this one is too wide for a single pin support. (Too much wobble introduced by the weight …I’ll work on it.)

In addition, got a bad sheet of maple, which i didn’t notice until I’d already engraved and cut the posts. I think I’ll replace that with some cherry PG, they look a little stark in maple. And I’m not happy with the size - they turned out a little bit too wide.

Other than that, I’m fairly pleased with it, and it’s fun to fidget with.