Spinners

Our son has three of them.

He loves inventing new ways to attempt to balance them on different things while they are spinning. He loves playing with the forces involved. They make excellent car toys. He also gets fidgety.

There is a fine line between something that keeps a fidgety kids hands active so they can focus better and something that is a toy. Right now, these are toys to him. His "fidget" of choice is still lumps of modeling clay. He will walk absent-mindedly around with lumps clay in his hands just randomly kneading and shaping it while he's paying attention to everything else. That's what a true "fidget" is. For some kids, fidget spinners work very well for that purpose.

a reply to: ketsuko

I don't get the hate for spinners
A new fad, like Pokemon, it's entertaining and fun, in 6 months they will be collectors items at half price
Let the children play and enjoy

The "Pet Rock" of modern times......it's say's there's an ADDHD engineer in a Chinese factory somewhere in China, and for the brief moment" He be da man!

The product may seem dumb to most; it is a fad like gazoo's, tickle me Elmo, garbage pail kids, cabbage patch dolls, pokemon, laser tag, Stomper trucks etc.

However, the guy who patented and made all the plastic ones you see that are made in China, he made $10 million+ in the first week of sales.

Not so dumb after all, huh..

Instead of wasting time complaining about them, perhaps one could throw on their thinking cap and create a fad themselves and figuratively "hit the lottery", too.

Just saying..

So, at one point I blew on the spinner from a stop and I noticed you could make it spin a little. Cool!

Then I remembered I had a can of that compressed air you use on your computer stashed in a cabinet. Man, now this thing really goes!! I wonder how fast I can get it going....

Well, if a can of compressed air works good, then my big shop compressor out in the barn ought to really get this thing haulin' the mail, right???

150 psi out of the pressure duster and WOW...this thing was turnin' about 60,000 rpms! I think it'll go higher!! ...

I'm now working on how to water cool the bearings because it's tough to hold onto this thing once they get white hot!

Stay tuned!

This is not the thread I was clicking for lol

What a terrible waste of resources, not to mention they must be made in china, furthering our debt to them. They will all end up in landfills.

Amateurs. Cleetus has GOT this:

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Things pass.
How many people now are obsessed with the Rubik's Cube?
How many people now are obsessed with the yo-yo?
But they were popular enough in their time.
"They have their day and cease to be".

a reply to: schuyler

Pfffffft...I'm working on a 2,000 psi prototype now. 850 psi is so yesterday!

In fact, I'm in the process of modeling a liquid nitrogen cooled nuclear version now. Off to the CNC machine!

a reply to: DISRAELI

I'm glad to see rubik's cube has made a series of comebacks through the years.
These spinners (already on the way out as I've been seeing them for a good portion of a year now) require nothing except ADD. At least yo-yos & rubik's cube required some degree of challenge.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: schuyler

Pfffffft...I'm working on a 2,000 psi prototype now. 850 psi is so yesterday!

In fact, I'm in the process of modeling a liquid nitrogen cooled nuclear version now. Off to the CNC machine!

SURE you are! Unless you show it on YouTube, it's so much hot air. Cleetus is da bomb!

I don't usually buy into fads...but it was too pretty... This is my spinner.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

they were passe weeks ago and deemed ridiculous

originally posted by: Raggedyman
a reply to: ketsuko

I don't get the hate for spinners
A new fad, like Pokemon, it's entertaining and fun, in 6 months they will be collectors items at half price
Let the children play and enjoy

The children were swallowing the parts and dying, though.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
I don't get the point of them, myself. Some people at work play around with them. I guess they're easily amused. It looks like they'd do just as well with a shiny bit of tinfoil. Anywho, you ever notice how they look like a Norelco shaver head?

Just a fad that will go away soon.
People don't think much about dropping down a couple bucks for entertainment.

I still haven't figured out the Pokemon craze from last summer, but I think that's gone now.

This isn't that much different than being in grade school 30 years ago andmost of us carried a couple roller bearings we'd salvage from various sources around in our pockets. We always had bearings and, for reasons I don't remember, we used the little motors from Stomper trucks as some weird redneck currency back then. You could usually trade the semi-circular magnets and rotors from the motors for somebody's mechanical pencil or whatnot and a still functioning motor was worth even more. We never really did anything with the little motors, just hooked them up to AA batteries and watched the flywheel gear spin, but the point is throughout history people have found joy in items otherwise pretty useless.

My kids each have one of the spinners and each have a fidget cube. It's mindless, but I think we can all use a little more mindlessness in this world.

The original inventor of these spinners had an autistic kid who was into spinning objects; desk fans, sand drills, bicycle wheels, buzz saws. She despaired at finding something that would stop him from playing with these objects. So she invented the fidget spinner. Of course, there are still dangers:

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

So these things are really designed with hidden transmitters, that hypnotize users and force the to spin, all day and night? Good to know!!

Seriously, I don't get it. No skill needed, nothing to compete with someone, just a thing that spins?