Wedding Centerpiece Spinner

With some inspiration from German Christmas pyramids and The Greatest Showman, I had an idea for table centerpieces for our wedding last month. Candles go inside the upper basket part to produce both light and heat. Used proofgrade Walnut for the stand and a much thinner walnut board from elsewhere for the basket.

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Cool idea. Congrats on your wedding!

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So the heat makes the turbine spin? Cool!

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Yeah.
Turbine. That’s a good word for it!

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Great idea! Congrats on your recent nuptials! :grinning:

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Beautiful! such a lovely design.

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How fun to have a Glowforge to make wedding items. Lovely piece!

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This is beautiful!

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Amazing! What a great concept! Any concerns about fire?

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clever!

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My first prototype did catch fire… but after a few design changes and many hours running many of these at once, there have been no fires since. But I guess I can’t say for sure they never would.

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Just a reminder it is against forum policy to ask someone for their design/plans unless in their post they say, “if anyone wants the plans ask.” If someone wants to share their design, they will post it in the Free Designs section.

It is acceptable to ask questions about the design, did they buy plans for it or come up with the design themselves, if they got the idea from Instructables or somewhere similar, or even something like, “Oh wow, I would love to make those for my wedding, how did you go about designing it.”

my bad

https://community.glowforge.com/faq#stealing

the policy is listed here if anyone else was curious.

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It’s okay. They just don’t want this place to be like other forums where someone posts something cool and is then hounded by dozens of people to give away their work. What I have found is that most people who post here are proud about what they have accomplished and love to talk about it when approached with questions about how they did something.

Nah… It’s a natural thing to want something so awesome!
The rule is in place to take artists out of the awkward position of having to say “No.”
We don’t want anybody feeling guilty about posting their awesomeness, after all! :slight_smile:

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Did you cut out the vanes for the spinner, too? How did you mount them?

This is really neat.

Sorry I’m late to respond. Thank you all for your interest! I’m flattered.

Yes, every last piece of it was laser cut with one exception: I used a fidget spinner bearing to rest the turbine on to reduce friction.

Each vane has a tab at the end. In the center is a sandwich of three circular pieces. The top and bottom are perfect circles. The middle piece has rectangular notches cut in it all the way around, one for each vane so that it looks a bit like a gear. The width of each notch is such that the length across the diagonal from the side (the height being the thickness of the material) is the same width as the tab at the desired tilt angle of the vanes (thank you Pythagoras!). You may need to read over that a couple times to understand… that was tough to describe.

Hope that helps!

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Brilliant!! you take a 2D material and “jam” it into the diagonal of the slot you cut for the “turbine.” is the inner circle of the “turbine” the same size as the fidget spinner bearing?