Bad movie night spinner (Audio is me speaking)

We wanted a spinner help make random movie selections for bad movie night.

The empty spots were for what we watched for bad movie night tonight, Project Grizzly, Noah's Ark [2007], and He-Man Masters of the Universe. The spinner has some pre-drilled 2 mm holes for some screws that are 4 mm with the threads and on the back I precisely measured the center points and counter sucks some holes for the big broad head of the screws. The screws came through the front of the Whiteboard and I carefully place the spinner onto the holes and hand screwed it on. I got a little bit of help from a friend they could hold it while I screwed

What it looks like in my living room, and it's already been vandalized. Boobs.

Loki, as a cat tax. That's his cat tree next to the TV on the other side from the spinner.

Cat tax part 2.

I have a lot of this dimensional lumber from the local hardware store that is of dubious quality and straightness, and here even spilled some junk on it.

I made sure to wear appropriate protection, thick sturdy gloves when doing actual cuts, hearing protection when using any power tool, safety glasses not pictured here, and nitrile gloves whenever working with chemicals.

I used a tool called a track saw to make long precise cuts to make the wood more square. Here is my cordless Milwaukee track saw it has a 6.5-in circular blade, and the portable Milwaukee shop vac that I'm using as a dust collector.

This is a stack of wood for the other project, but some off cuts from this turned into the parts for this project. Even this cheap Lumber can be made very precise if your patient.

There's a whiteboard component that is mostly a piece of plywood. Here's the off cut I had four by 10 ft sheets and I cut off a 3x4 foot sheet for what I needed.

For the Whiteboard surface I used this self-adhesive whiteboard tape from 3M it comes in a 50 ft by 5 foot roll, this is also spare from another project.

To get rounded edges I used a tool called a router and this router bit. The silver part is a ball bearing that keeps the tool from sliding too far into the material and allowed me to just follow all the way around and make the round cut around the base, spinner, and whiteboard before applying the Whiteboard tape.

Here's an example of that 3M self-adhesive tape, this blue backing comes off and then you can stick it to whatever you want to be a whiteboard, be sure clean any surface before you apply it or it won't stick well. It sounds obvious but a lot of people sand a surface right before they put the whiteboard material on to make it very smooth and then presume just vacuuming is good enough. It definitely isn't particularly when considering applying it to drywall or sanded wood, you really need to go over that with a brush and paper towel and any other way to pick up the dust you can think of.

This is me playing with sliding the bearings into the wood hole because I wanted to see if this would work, I did and I was playing with the dowel to see what I could get fit because this is all a big prototype. This is also before I routed the corners so you can see it you just have a block of pine that's fairly dimensionally accurate. To get a hole this precise without a drill press I carefully found the diagonal center lines of my square piece to find the center, then used a center punch to precisely Mark the middle, then I used a small 2 mm bit to cut the hole and then a router bit the exact size of the bearings I had. I used my router with a plunge base and precisely set the plunge depth and braced both my router and the piece in place with clamps.

I use cheap stain and varnish from the hardware store. I started by sanding the whole thing at 80 grit to make sure that the stain would be absorbed really well. There is exposed end grain (which absorbs a lot of stain compared to cross grain and looks really dark) on this tiny piece so I tried to open up the pores of the wood as much as possible with such a rough grit that it would soak in everywhere a lot and make the piece very dark hopefully minimizing how bad any end grain looked. Then I applied varnish, then I sanded at 120 grit then I applied stain then I sanded at.. alternating between varnish and 200 grit and varnish 400 Grit and varnish and 400 grit until it was sufficiently shiny. I didn't want this to look like a mirror otherwise you can go all the way up the grit stack, I think I have sandpaper up in the floor and 6000 grit range it feels a lot like rubbing notebook paper on a thing.

Here I have the spinner part mostly done. I used some extra bearings from a 3D printer project, I built a printer a while back, and I overbought on some supplies that were cheap.

This is just me playing with the spinner while it's on my workbench.

I repeatedly balanced the spinner on a precise straight edge on level surface. That Irwin Corner Square you might have seen in one of the pictures up above, I took the straight edge out of that and leveled a work surface so it would balance on end and I carefully placed the unstained spinner on in two perpendicular orientations until I found the exact center and precisely marked it. Then I used a tap handle instead of a drill to hold a 5 mm drill bit and precisely drill out a hole at exactly the angle I wanted this at at that Center of mass. I want did the spinner leaning slightly so the point was closer to the surface it would be resting on. But I wanted it to spin in a vertical orientation Fair so all this balance work was required.

This leaf blower was good for clearing away sawdust, less so for fumes. I used a little bit of CA glue to hold the pointer to the dowel, the dowel to the bearings, and the bearings to the base. Not so much that it's permanently on there I'm sure I could pull out any of the three but it would probably cost me the dowel. I know that bearings are a consumable part in the long run but I figure this was easy enough to build and I'm certain that by the time the bearings go, I will want to do other work to make this look good again.