Yarn Spinner

Yarn Spinner
This project started after I saw a post from PapaS concerning his Yarn Caddie. http://lumberjocks.com/projects/61843
I decided to make a couple for my wife with a slightly different design. This picture shows the final result.

The main purpose of the spinner is to allow the skein of yarn to spool off of the spinner as the Knitter works on her project. It also eliminates the need to wind the entire skein of yarn into a ball to make it easier to control.

I found that the most difficult part of making this was finding an adequate bearing that would allow smooth operation. I remembered that I had a motor that I had removed from a bad computer hard disk drive, and boy does it run smoothly. A friend of my wife worked as an IT specialist and had a box full of defective hard drives. They were used to make more spinners.
This is how I built it:

This picture shows the base of the spinner. The walnut was cut on the band saw about 5-1/2” in diameter. I then counter bored with a forstner bit so that the motor could be mounted using three #4 screws. The original disk from the hard drive was remounted using its hardware.

This shows the top disk. It is also about 5-1/2” in diameter. It was also counter bored and then drilled through with a 1/2” bit. The counter bore is required to clear the top of the motor and the 1/2” hole is for the dowel that gets glued to the top disk. Make sure that the counter bore is sized so that the motor fits snugly into the bore. You must make sure that the dowel does not touch the motor since it would make it difficult to rotate.

Double sided carpet tape is used to attach the top disk to the hard drive motor.

I have made around 20 of these now and the ladies really like them. They make great Christmas presents.

-- "A goal without a plan is a wish."