Cherry Hill Portal spinner deconstructed!

I’d like to start off by saying that I’m just doing this, and I am paying for these spinners out of pocket. None of the opinions I have are official or anything, and I really mostly understand 3d printing and how that would work. I have two more coming to be destroyed, the ShimmerHollow one, aka the Charmcaster (just the glass bead part for now) and one from SJ 3Designs, aka Glassify. Those are coming, I don’t have them yet, but I will document the destruction!

Anyway, onto today’s. I was originally excited about this one because the purpose of the hole in the middle was to let you see the glass bead as you create it. Cool gimmick, impractical, at least for me. The best way to spin it (that didn’t hurt your wrist as you did so) was to use a flat hand and tuck the little knob into a space between your fingers. This allowed speed and used your shoulder more than your wrist. But the results were pretty inconsistent, and it was hard to keep the top of the spinner attached to the bottom, as the rotating motion made it want to rock. This was exacerbated by the fact that there is a LOT of friction involved here, which I’ll get to. It comes with two bases, a short one and taller one. The taller one was too tall for me, and the short one worked a bit better but still had the issue with the rocking.

Anyway, onto the destruction (and the construction, because I think it’s pretty cool.)

The bottom of the top piece wasn’t cleaned up real well. For $24.95 ($30 after shipping to me), I really thought it would be cleaned up better, because there clearly was a lot of thought put into the design.

From the looks of things, the spinning part was printed separate from the housing, and the magnets were glued in. Once the glue dried, the spinning part was placed in the housing and a small lip was printed to keep it in place, which is really clever.

However. The magnets stick down below the plastic of the spinning part by about half a millimeter. I’m not sure what happened, but this might be a measurement error. This adds a bunch of friction, because the lower surface is grooved from being 3d printed. I originally added a lot of cuticle oil (what I had on hand) to help, and it worked pretty well. However, I also taped the top to the bottom part (to help keep things aligned properly) and after a few days of sitting, the oil had seeped through the printing lines and gotten everywhere.

As for the magnets, they are held in quite well, in small stacks of two (I only managed to get one set out, but I’m assuming all the stacks are the same size), for a total of 20 little button magnets. It took a while for me to chisel away at the plastic enough to figure out that they were glued in place (the 5D magnets were loose inside their housing.

All in all, this one looks cool, but the results were inconsistent and had a lot of small magnets, rather than a few big ones.

To appease the robot mods, my nail polish is ‘the Comfort of You’ from Uno Mas, topped with Brilliante, Backyard Hootenanny, Princesa of the fairies and Wing Dust, all also from Uno Mas.