Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make a Bottle Opener Fidget Spinner”.
Welcome back to the workshop, i’m tyler, and today i want to talk about fidget spinners they’ve been around for a while just about every maker under the sun has made one and you’re probably sick of hearing about them by now. That’S why i want to make one that does something useful, [ Applause ], i’m basing my design off of this concept. I made this bottle opener out of 1 8 inch steel in my basic metal working class at tech shop. The design is pretty simple.
You drill out this radius on the drill press and then cut along this tangent on a bandsaw. Finally, you cut out this line on the bandsaw as well to form the hook. That’Ll catch the bottle cap.
Now, if i was any good with a band saw, i could cut out this design entirely by hand, but i’m not good with the bandsaw. That’S why i’m going to be cutting this out of quarter inch aluminum on a cnc machine, but at least this way i can share my design files with you, so you can make your own i’m going to start out with the main radius of the bearing, which Is 22 millimeters, then i’m going to create an outer radius for the body of the spinner. Before i go any further, i’m going to split the circles in half that way. I can just design one side and then duplicate it to the other. So it’s perfectly symmetrical. Next, i’m going to create the inner and outer circles for the hook that catches the edge of the bottle cap, draw one line, that’s tangent to the top edges of both circles and then draw another line.
That’S tangent to the inside of the hook to the outside of the main body then draw an angled line to form the edge of the hook, use the trim tool to clean up the extraneous lines and reveal our design. The last thing we need is a little bump in the middle of this line. This will act as an anvil that will give us a little bit of extra leverage when prying the cap off fill it out. Any sharp edges when you’re happy with your design, select all of the elements and then duplicate it using the circular pattern tool and then extrude the sketch to your desired thickness.
I’M using quarter inch aluminum. So, for me, it’s 6.35 millimeters, i’m an amateur machinist on the best of days and the x-carve isn’t the best tool for this job. But after a little bit of trial and error and finding the right setup, i’m happy with the results i’m getting the bit. I’M using is a quarter inch two-flute upcut bit, i’m getting decently small chips with a feed rate of 30 inches per minute, and there isn’t much deflection with a 0.02 inch depth of cut.
I’M cutting dry and blowing the chips out with my shop vac. There’S a little bit of heat in the metal, but it’s not building enough to start galling after cutting through the tabs, i’m taking a file to smooth them out, and then i hit it with some 220 grit on an orbital sander to give it a nice surface. Finish on the flat surfaces. Finally, i’m adding the bearing the tolerances are very loose, so i’m using some epoxy to glue it in place, taking care to keep it clear, the bearing races. Finally, i pop out the solder shield – these bearings aren’t grease packed. They just have a really light oil, so they don’t need any cleaning, but you might want to do that beforehand. If yours do so, this is a pretty high-tech way to make a fun and useful spinner. But this certainly isn’t the only way be sure to check out caleb’s video about how to make a fidget spinner with almost no tools. But if you do want to make this one check out the link right up there to get access to my fusion 360 files, plus dxf and svg files free to use in whatever cad software. You like thanks for watching, we’ll see you in the next article you .
