Cardboard, ball bearings and bam! A DIY fidget spinner. © Victor Didelot
You can’t miss them… On every street corner, in shops and schools, fidget spinners are everywhere! Makery offers you this DIY tutorial for under 2€.
It’s the latest ultimate gadget. According to Wikipedia, a fidget spinner is a toy that “has been advertised as helping people who have trouble focusing or fidgeting by acting as a release mechanism for nervous energy or stress.” Available in all shapes and colors imaginable, fidget spinners (a kind of top you spin in your hand) have disrupted the lives of many (for better or for worse). Needless to say, we haven’t found much use for them at Makery. So we thought we might as well make a quick and cheap tutorial based on ball bearings and cardboard.
Materials
– Ball bearings (from your skateboard or commercial fidget spinner, less than $2 for 10);
– Cardboard (or wood, Plexiglass, etc., the procedure is the same);
– Scissors and a Cutter;
– Glue;
– Pencil and ruler.
Assembly
1) Mark the center and the circular axis of the spinner on the cardboard. 2 or 3 centimeters away from the center, mark a point for each branch of your customized fidget spinner. Make sure the branches are well balanced for it to spin properly (3 branches are separated by a 120° angle, 4 branches = 90°, 5 branches = 72°, etc).
2) The points will be the centers of the bearings on each branch (see below). Once the basic shape has been defined, you can sketch out your personal design: round, square, star, etc. If the cardboard is too thin, repeat the steps for another layer until the spinner is as thick as the bearings. Cut out the edges with the scissors and the holes with the Cutter.
Insert the bearings into the holes. Et voilà!
Too simple? We found a few variants.
Fidget spinners for Applemaniacs
Apple product tester EverythingApplePro had a funny idea. Take an iPhone and drill a hole the size of a ball bearing in the center of the device. Congratulations, your iPhone is now a several-hundred-dollar fidget spinner. The iPhone, on the other hand, is as good as dead.
Joerg Sprave’s dangerous fidget spinner
The single-minded goal of The Slingshot Channel is to make any object as dangerous as possible. So you can imagine what kind of ideas Joerg Sprave, the man behind the slingshot, can cook up with a spinner in his hands… Not to mention his video of a fidget spinner slingshot. Do not try this at home!
PewDiePie the human fidget spinner
The Youtuber with 55 million subscribers continues his offbeat series to follow the fidget spinner trend… in his own way.