Playground Spinner Pencil Holder & Sharpener

Summary Continued

This 14 cm x 14 cm x 7.7 cm playground spinner is one of a whole set of playground-themed office supplies, and with all the parts together, it really does feel like you’re a kid just playing around. The only piece that can’t be printed is the pencil sharpener, so if you want to buy one, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00777UBFI. I didn’t do this alone, and Braden (@bradenG_2915720) and Noah (@npoyau_2915673) were great partners for this project.

Lesson Plan and Activity

For this assignment, we acted as a group hired by Staples to create more aesthetically pleasing desktop office supplies due to their declining sales. We needed to create a set of objects with one common theme and be able to explain it, so a potential customer would want to purchase the entire set.

Assembly Instructions

The only parts that need to be put in after being printed separately are the handles. Make sure you have printed out eight of them because the file only contains one. There are small holes in the main part that align with the bottom of each of the handles. By putting them in and pushing them down gently, they should stay in securely. The main part can go inside the base so that it spins. The main function of the piece is to hold pencils, but there is also a hole in the middle to put a pencil sharpener. Make sure the hole of the pencil sharpener is facing up and aligned with the edges of the part; it can be placed inside and later taken out if needed.

Design Process

We started off the design with a basic sketch that we could revolve to create the main part. 

We then created a boss extrude and extruded cut to make places to hold the pencils. We wanted to use a circular pattern to make the holes around the whole part, but we forgot to make a reference for the software to know which direction to move. For that reason, we created a construction line through the origin and the centers of the circles.

To make sure the pencil sharpener fit securely, we added a rectangular cut extrude to the circle in the middle so that the corners would be accounted for.

We wanted to make a circle and then sweep it to make a handle that would create a circular pattern just like for the holes. We originally thought 1.5 cm would work, but it was too close, so we changed it to 2 cm.

We didn't originally create a reference plane for the sweep, and because it wasn't aligned with the front or right plane, we needed to. 

After using a circular pattern to create handles all around the main part, we used the fillet feature for the base and the hole to make the final product look better.

To make the spinner look more realistic to what someone might find on a playground, we changed the handle design by making two sweeps that intersected, and then used a circular pattern to repeat the design.

Now that we had the basic design down, we started to think about the colors. To split the main part so that we could color it differently but still keep it as one, we needed to use the split feature. In order to use the split feature, we needed reference planes. We began by making an axis in the center, and then made two reference planes in between the right and front planes, so that the main part would be split into eight equal sections. We used the split command and created eight individual bodies.

We had one more step before we started to color. We thought that the handles would look better if the arcs for the back part were tangent to the straight section, so we changed it.

We were done! Except…

In order to print this piece most efficiently, we would need to flip the main part over so we didn’t use as many supports. The problem with that was that our handles were still part of the bodies that were the main part, so we couldn’t print them separately. However, this was a quick fix because we used the split command and a plane on the surface of the main part to split the handles, making them separate bodies. That’s why you’ll see that as a separate file to print.

Because of that we had to make holes in the main part that would allow the handles to fit inside, and we just did that by offsetting the sweep sketches in a new sketch.

I hope you enjoy using this in your everyday life!