Spinning Tops Orbital Series by YSoft_be3D is licensed under the Creative Commons – Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share Alike license.

Okay, I’m kind of phoning it in this week. This one is straight from Thingiverse to the printer. It’s a simple spinning top with a few options for the body and tip. I saw this a while ago and I liked the design for its simplicity and ease of printing.

The truth is I’ve been playing the new Path of Exile expansion all weekend and I haven’t felt like designing anything. I always tend to procrastinate and do this on Sunday, but this is the first week I almost decided to skip entirely. Being continuously creative on a deadline is hard.

I was going to post this as-is and leave it at that. Just someone else’s top printed on my printer. But that much is routine at this point. Get a thing from the Internet, print it. Easy. Too easy. I felt really guilty at the last minute.

It’s a fine top. Not great, but fine. I really hit on a solid design with my first tops. Those things spin a long time. This top– average. It’s fine. I should do something with it though, or it’s not a Widget Weekly top.

So I added some metal marbles, first by drilling some holes and then taking the trusty soldering iron and applying heat to melt the plastic around them. Elegant? No. Precise? Not really. Effective? Yes. Spin times went from about 20 seconds to about 40 seconds, just from three tiny marbles. It’s something.

There’s probably better ways to do this, like making the wings solid infill while keeping the rest of the top hollow. I can think of how I’d do it in Slic3r PE by splitting it into different parts with different infill settings. But not this week. Back to video games.