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Hello Everyone, I would like to share my newest 3d print design with you. The Turbine Top is a 3d printed spinning top designed to accelerate as air passes through it. My inspiration was the feeling of sitting in your seat looking out the window during take off, and listening to the hum of the spinning turbines on a big Boeing 747. An incredible feeling that I strive to capture in this mesmerizing piece of kinetic art. Blowing on this top will get it roaring with speed, easily spinning unassisted for longer than 5 minutes. It’s incredibly easy to use and has an effective, ergonomically friendly, spiral grip that promotes a good spin. It’s by far the most comfortable top in my personal collection and with out sacrificing the aesthetics that really make it look like a turbine. This top has a wonderful campfire effect to it … as it slows down watch closely as an illusion of speed seems to shift the direction of the spin. A faster spin will provide multiple direction changing illusions that are truly incredible to watch.

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Love this!! Haven’t had much metal printing experience yet, how did finishing process affect the resolution of the print with such fine details? (I assume the part was bead blasted or something similar to finish the part?)

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Thanks for the complement, I really love it too. Ever since I made it I’ve been spinning it every day.Far too addicting so I’m making more air powered tops. The polishing did absolutely remove material from the print. I originally got the print via shapeways, it was their bronze coated steel, with really retains almost every detail… I was impressed with my first steel prints. So it was brown, and the inside of mine (in the video) is still brown and I like it a lot. It also had a small tooling mark from the support material being cut away. I spun it on a lathe and polished it to my satisfaction, removing at least .5mm from the surface and any trace of the tooling mark. The top spun quite a bit better the polish, but only really needed it for looks. I don’t think you could hand polish the steel quite like this, but this design was easy to clamp into the chuck for polishing. I ended up using a file to clean up the line around the outside too, the polishing started to cut into it, but I wasn’t ready to stop because of that tooling mark.

So, in summary… Shapeways does lightly polish their steel, you don’t lose very much detail, hardly noticeable to me. But, their steel material will also have one hidden tooling mark on it some where from them removing the support material or something like that. Some times you can’t find it right away but it’s there if you look hard. If you decide you want to polish that tooling mark off, you will then start to lose some notable resolution in your model.

Cheers @bdurack. Let me know if you think of anything else you wanna ask.

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Very nice, could be a new playtoy succes!

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Wow. This is brilliant. Why hadn’t I though of that. Really nice and well designed. We need more of these innovative creations in the world!

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Thank you! That’s very nice.

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Thank you!

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No problem. I hope you go on and create more amazing ideas in the future