Beautiful engineering 👏 I really appreciate the simplicity, but at the same time would also love to see you take Mk. 22 to the next level with some kind of Guilloché engraving around the edge. Adding a conical/spiral pattern similar to a barbershop pole 💈 would not only create a cool visual effect, but also lets the audience appreciate the fact your spinning top is actually rotating! The stillness is mesmerising in its own right, but I think a mathematical Guilloché would elevate the artistry. Keep up the great work 🙌
Cool idea! I would like to add something to better illustrate the spin speed but and a bit concerned that engraving directly on the flywheel's outer edge could dramatically increase air drag. I'll consider my options!
About recessed ball tips in heavy tops. Especially with carbide spinning surfaces: my experience is that the ball tip wears out more rapidly, (a few hours of spinning), then the top starts to wobble spontaneously and persistently because of this. The amplitude of the wobble increases as the ball becomes more worn out, and this wobble cannot be corrected by the screws. This wobble is not unbalance but nutation. You just replace the tip, (or rotate the worn out ball tip so that the contact point is shifted to a virgin spot of it), and that wobble disappears. The superposition of the two wobbles, nutation and unbalance, appears in the form of intermittent wobble; I see a bit of intermittent wobble in your top. The presence of the nutation can make more difficult to fine tune the balance of the top; if you want a better balance and if you have persistent nutation, I would suggest first to replace/rotate the ball tip, for to eliminate the nutation, then it will be easier to fine tune the balance, with the screws. I found carbide spinning surfaces to be slightly abrasive for ball tips, even for ruby/sapphire and similar super hard ball tips. Maybe using glass for the spinning surface could be better in this case, at least in the sense to elongate the life of those precious ball tips, but the spin times would be reduced... not easy to find the perfect balance between all these factors..
Thank you for the insight! Yes, even with the grub screws, balancing can be a bit challenging with ball tips. I'll keep an eye out for suitable concave glass lenses, do you have any recommendations :) Also, what has your experience with heavy tops been? This one is over 800g and I think tip friction is quite significant as a result.
@@hiper_tops , little concave glass lenses should be good; I wouldn't buy expensive ones since they will become scratched, even if the tip is a ball and not spiked. I have little experience with glass, anyway. Your top should have an excellent efficiency, and, at parity of starting speed, it should spin longer than your other littler tops. If you can find a way to spin it at an higher speed than with fingers, (maybe with the help of a string or a motor), it could spin for very long, if you can avoid the hulahoop problems. If you want your tops to be spun just with the fingers, (even if by multiple twirls), based on my experience, I would say that 800 grams is too much for longest spins. My heaviest top is 847 grams, and its longest spin "only" 41 m 25 s. It has the best efficiency of all my tops but with fingers I can start it at no more than 1100-1150 RPM, while I can start my other littler tops up to about 3000 RPM, and the better efficiency does not compensate for the too slow starting speed. The optimal weight seems about 300-400 grams, for longest spins with recessed tip and multiple twirls, at least for my fingers. The farest from this weight range, the shorter the spin times.
@@hiper_tops good idea! And good comment/point by Iacopo. Hard metals like this can become abrasive on a microscopic scale due to the crystalline grain structure of the metals and different harder phases that can be interspersed within the metal. Studied die wear in metal forming and this was a real issue with some alloys.
Any thoughts on getting a transparent plastic cylinder to enclose the top while it spins? Could increase spin time quite a bit by allowing the top to accelerate the air inside without dissipating that energy as much, and much easier to set up than a vacuum chamber lol
Although this might seem to work at first glance, it will increase the aerodynamic drag instead. The air will be slowed down heavily by the cylinder. Similarly, driving a train through a tunnel actually increases the drag it needs to overcome.
@@RowingIsFun Have a look at what Iacopo Simonelli did with is tops here: th-cam.com/video/oKxrP7-QXpk/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=IacopoSimonelli He made an enclosure and it helped! However I find this strategy a bit dodgy/cheaty soo I'm not sure if I would implement it
@@RowingIsFuncould the train be due to needing to push the air in front of it out of the way despite being in an enclosed space where the air cannot easily be pushed aside? I would think that a train in a tunnel would have a massive amount of air pressure at the front and very low pressure behind it and that the sides would be some sort of spectrum of that
@ProfessorThock that is a factor, but the problem with the cylinder approach is that the air in the cylinder has friction with the outside of the top, but also with the inside of the cylinder. So the air around the top will move slower and cause it to stop quicker. If you make a vacuum in the tube then I expect things will be different
@@cncgeneral A vacuum would certainly be ideal, although this would change the design considerations for my tops quite drastically! A low mass, high inertia top would be preferred
Hi, James. You had a very good idea making the screws internal; you should have a bit less air drag in this way, and the design is aesthetically cleaner. Bravo !
Thank you! I am quite happy with it. I think with a better proportioned flywheel and perhaps a different tip arrangement, it could make for a very long spinner!
Sorry if it has been asked before but, would it not be "better" for accurately testing the tops and the effects of the changes, to use a machine to spin the top? That way you can set a specific speed or energy and see how long they spin.
Telephone line amplifiers in the countryside used to have a giant spinning flywheel for energy storage to overcome power outages. When such flywheel broke loose, it went straight through the wall and traveled quite a distance across the fields.
Would it be considered cheating to embed powerful magnets in the center of the top and base to lower the effect of friction? I suppose it could also make it harder to balance.
I became curious what the performance per gram of mass was, and luckily you've provided the weight in (most of) your videos! So I made a little chart. Version Weight Duration Seconds Seconds per gram Mk.04 135g 00:25:02 1502s 11.126s/g Mk.10 110g 00:28:03 1683s 15.300s/g Mk.15 252g 00:38:26 2306s 9.151s/g Mk.17 312g 00:42:08 2528s 8.103s/g Mk.19 377g 00:48:01 2881s 7.642s/g Mk.20 336g 00:41:43 2503s 7.449s/g Mk.21 800g 00:40:04 2404s 3.005s/g I put it all into a Google Sheet which I would share, but TH-cam doesn't like links.
Wow good work! It is found that lighter tops achieve the best minute:gram ratios. There are some very small "zen-ratio" tops which spin for as many minutes as grams they weigh!
@@hiper_tops I doubt such 1:1 ratios are easy to achieve. Going by these stats it would need to be a particularly light top, which in turn wouldn't spin all that long. Still, it's interesting for me to see. Also this latest top is particularly heavy.
Came here to say the same since the author mentioned that air friction drag is the primary driver of energy loss previously. It's been a couple decades since fluids classes, though recollection is primary drag considerations as form/pressure drag and surface/skin drag. The dimples (or other types of surface texture) create a boundary layer of turbulent flow. For a golf ball, that primarily prevents the laminar flow from separating from the ball as early, creating a smaller low pressure zone behind the ball - sort of like functionally reducing the apparent cross-sectional area as it travels through the air. In other applications that surface texture & boundary layer separation can increase the shear angle at the surface, which you could think of as resulting in dragging less fluid mass along with the moving surface. Some ship hulls and competitive swim suits used this, which was modeled after shark denticles (scales).
@@goku445 wonder how much would be gained by texturing the launching tip, relative velocity is lower - great for grip though (like the knurling he's applied previously). Surface texturing in a non-load bearing application could be applied in a number of ways - coatings, media blasting, etching - especially if he has the adjustable balancing in these newer models. This would be a fun CFD analysis.
I have no idea how i found this video, but I love it! I mqke all sorts of things: knives, hammers, and I was leaning towards starting on a complete armor set. BUT! I simply must make my own top having watched several videos. I find watching them compelling. Impressive.
They are simple and satisfying to watch! And once you get keen on making them spin for longer and look at the other spinning top makers, it can be quite addictive haha
Would like some optical spinning marks; something that you can clearly see is spinning. I thinking about putting "dots" on my little cheap one so I can judge RPM in a 60hz light...should be able to lines shift as the speed changes? Like an old school turn table? 😬
Awesome engineering and manual machining work on this build! Have you experimented with not including the knurling on the spindle? I’m curious if you could still get the top up to speed by hand with a polished spindle, and lower your aero drag. Cheers!
I think I could but it would take quite a bit longer and be much harder to start! With such a large moment of inertia, these tops need a good grip haha. I plan on reducing the size of the knurled section though
This thing is made of a heavy metal, because it’s heavy. You’d have to put in a very strong magnet to do that. Or a bigger magnet, which would then take away from its weight.
I'm not sure the the algorithm bought me to your channel but I love it. I wonder if there is anything in using an air cushion to improve the spin time. Although I don't know if high pressure, low pressure, stable airflow or unstable airflow would alter the outcomes.
It may spin longer, have a look at air bearings like what steve mould has. However its not really a spinning top in my opinion! It has to be able to fall over haha
Have you considered adding a lubricant then air pressure to the base. Add just enough air pressure so the top is lifted when it spins. The liquid lubricant acts as a seal to keep the air from escaping. You just need to increase the air pressure slightly to "float" the top above the surface. This would reduce the friction to near zero.
Fantastic work!!! To get the maximum spin time have you thought about running your top in a clear vacuum chamber? Once that is done maybe levitate your top in a vacuum chamber. I think that would give the ultimate spin time short of spinning it in space.
I like that you showed something about the process of the making. At some point you used two chucks, one attached to the other; I never saw this before. You did so for to make possible/easier to drill the four holes in the flywheel ?
Thank you haha, the double chuck was a bit of a botch job, I would have just used the bigger rotary chuck but it couldn't grip the flywheel appropriately. It was a bit harder to get everything lined up with two chucks though. The bigger chuck can rotate to many different angles precisely which was handy, how do you make your holes?
@@hiper_tops , I make the holes on the lathe, like you. In my case, the simplest way I found for to measure the angles between the holes is with a trick; in my lathe the chuck is linked to a gear with 48 teeth. So I put a wedge in the 16th, 32th and 48th tooth for to keep the chuck in three positions, (since I use three screws), which are 120 degrees from each other. A piecemeal solution, but it works.
I do still think that you may be well-served here to investigate alternative orders-of-operations and workholding to suit. Specifically, it seems to me that if you can rough-machine the top, then install the tip, and then, with the tip installed and the rough top held between centers (using a reverse dead-center with plenty of lubrication) you will then be able to finish turn and polish the part with the tip on centreline of the lathe, which is not possible with the order of operations as presented in the videos I've seen so far (but of course videos may not be representative! you may already know this quite well, and so I apologize in advance for having harped on about something you've already known). Also: I've never built a high performance top. I'm a hobby machinist who is a stranger on the internet, and you should feel entirely free to ignore what I've said becuase there may be good reasons you've already considered the idea and cast it aside. Though now you have me wanting to build a top.
Hello! This is an interesting idea, I've never used reverse-dead-centres before. I think the viability of this method depends on the tip design on the spinning top. For example, Mk.20 used a 1.6mm ball bearing and I don't think the sleeve which held it would support the whole top for machining. I'm just a first year university student so also not very qualified when it comes to machining haha. I will keep your idea in mind!
@@hiper_tops I'm simply going to have to try, myself. :D I promise to document it somehow and share that with you. I'm not really a videographer in any meaningful sense
Have you thought about putting dimples or shark skin bumps like they do for the Americas Cup racing boats to allow better laminar flow? Some watch or clock makers will make concave ruby surfaces for the Ruby tip to sit in.
The dimples help with pressure drag which the boats and golf balls experience because they move through their respective fluids. However since the top sits still, it only experiences friction drag which the dimples actually increase! I am looking into more advanced surface options though :) Also a ruby base would be cool! I would have to check what tips would be suitable to use on it though and work from there
instead of making it the same size as your previous versions, you could take advantage of the density of tungsten another way - make it smaller so it'll have the same-ish mass as your brass tops, but being smaller will have much less drag with the same friction. that should blow your mk.20 out of the water.
Why don't you use magnetic levitation to remove friction? Also use some starter to give all yours Mk-s the same amount of torque for clear comparison between all Mk-s versions.
Instead of a concave base, I have used captured ring of ball bearings which both provides easily replaceable parts, and also reduces the force from friction that can be imparted onto the top.
Interesting, how come this reduces the friction imparted on the top? I would have thought having more contact points and mechanical action would create more energy loss
I could suggest a few things, but I'm not quite sure to what extent they would contribute: First, a full Optical-Grade polishing on all surfaces should reduce friction from pretty much any source by a not-insignificant amount, say, .05micron or better. Second, the stem knurling. That's gotta be grabbing air like crazy, so smoothing that over would be best to reduce air friction. Third, I would find a better way to balance the flywheel while on the lathe. Perhaps mounting the main flywheel mass on the spindle before turning it down at all would provide for a better opportunity to balance it more uniformly. Last, I would cut down on the smooth, sweeping curves on the flywheel mass. Sharper corners should present a smaller surface area to grab onto the air from surface drag effects.
Interesting suggestions. However, micro-riblets in the direction of the air flow may be better than perfectly smooth surfaces in terms of viscous drag. You seem to describe the flywheel machining stage as I do it - good intuition! However I'm not sure I agree with you thoughts on square flywheels being more aero. They have a larger surface area and more area at a larger radius, hence larger relative speed, pressure gradient etc drag. If there is research you have found contra to this, please let me know :)
Wow. Just found your channel. Super amazing. Have you considered including a pump-action style addition to the textured tip of the top, allowing you to consistently add torque without your fingers touching the top affecting its momentum? Or would that compromise the intent of using a top like this? Thanks so much for your artistic touch to the interesting technical marvel you’ve created!
Reducing the bearing size sounds good but why not try air bearings or magnetic bearing. You also said your reduce the mass, Why? Is reducing the mass not a step backwards, or do you want to reduce the mass to reduce friction? If so, i refer to my prev comment on using near frictionless bearings and that would also change things up. You could also consider adding a vaccume chamber and suck as much air out as possable... never seen a top made in such ways before (well a side mounted mag lev top but thats a proof of concept toy. Good channel, please do keep it comming. ps, you could always go the other way and create ultra light top with super thin bearing and polished like a samuri sword.
I think its interesting how many directions you can take this simple challenge. These are all good ideas what would make for a long spin however I struggle to see a way to implement them in a 'spinning top' (how would a top using air bearings fall over? The stability of a top should come from gyroscopic effects not bearings). I might think more about what exactly I'm trying to achieve but for now a vacuum chamber feels like cheating (but would be a cool experiment).
would a convex rather than concave surface be better. less suface contact between surfaces and stability in riding to the top of the curved surface, like train wheels and flat belt pullies?
Yes I saw that! it's very cool but I don't think a top could implement it - a top needs to be able to fall over and if a flywheel is floating on an air bearing it would have to be stable!
Have you considered adding dimples to the spinning top, similar to golf balls? From what I understand, it creates a layer of turbulent air around the ball, which reduces friction. It may not actually work, since the scenarios are not entirely similar, but it could be worth a try.
Dimples reduce the pressure drag of golf balls but increase the friction drag. Since my spinning tops aren't moving through the air, dimples would likely only increase friction drag. However yes I would like to test this! Perhaps if I ever get access to CNC tech
What if you created an air seal instead of a tip so that the top floats on the tip like and air hockey puck and run the air source through base up to the tip? If done correctly, you would fully eliminate tip wear... the only downside is you need a compressor like a fish bubbler or something to provide a little air pressure and flow. The top would be hovering and that would be cool. Edit: you could use water or oil as well with a small water pump.
Have you thought about levitating your spinning top with magnets? Probably cheating a little bit too much though. The Sapphire tip will be your best option unless you want to go for diamond or a superalloy created in a lab. And spinning it on a surface as hard, flat, level and smooth as possible will help so much. Looking forward to the MK-22
Also it is possible to seal off the outside magnetic field by putting your contraption in a iron box. The thickness required depends on the strength of the field and the size of your box, magnet feild won't penetrate a wall as long as it is not saturated.
@@fakestory1753 Luckily no ferromagnetic materials and the earths magnetic field is weak enough for the non-ferromagnetic metals to have negligible eddy current losses
I was actually thinking the opposite - if you could use a magnet to pull the top upwards. This would reduce weight and friction on the tip, but keep the mass and inertia. Now what material would be suitable for that and how on earth you would balance such a mechanism, I’m not sure. Maybe the top half of the handle could be ferromagnetic and you could have a mechanism to center & lower a strong magnet close to it after you get it spinning. It‘d be interesting to see how much difference it makes! I think it would also help stabilise wobbling too.
I think the knurling is causing more energy loss than you'd think, even though the air speed at that surface is comparably low. You don't even use the lower half of the knurling. Use a laser tachometer to measure initial rpm of one of your hand spun tops with knurling. Make a top without knurling that you can get going by hand just enough for it to balance, then get it up to speed with compressed air. Using the tach to ensure they both had the same initial rpm, you can see how much the drag from the knurling is really affecting efficiency. Great video, but I'm disturbed by the scratch on one side! 😱 That can't be intentional for balance right because you'd just use the grub screws?
Many people have pointed this out about the knurling so I would like to test it! And the scratch is sadly not intentional (manufacturing didn't go perfectly smoothly)
Is it possible to make an internal groove in the flywheel before pressing in the aluminum core, that you could add water, or ceramic beads to create a dynamically balanced top? The beads/water would naturally move as to balance the top at each spin up. (Mercury would also work if you did not use an aluminum center, but is a hassle to work with) Also, do you think the Knurls are producing meaningful drag? I think you could still spin it up with a polished cone. You may consider a beryllium center as well. Or carbon fiber.
I'm not sure about liquid in the flywheel helping the balance as my intuition says it would flow to the point with the largest radius (most leaning out) and hence would make the balance worse. The knurls add a little drag but a negligible amount compared to the flywheel due to its small radius. A smooth spindle would be annoying to use so I tend to accept the 5 second time loss. Beryllium is an interesting suggestion I hadn't thought of. I have considered magnesium in the past but it is scary to work with being so reactive.
@@hiper_tops take a look at balance beads for tires and the various demonstrations of it. I’m not sure it would apply to spinning tops, but it certainly works wonders on other things.
I think I need a little extra explanation on the tip and the screws. It looks like there is a single ball in the middle to function as the tip on which to spin, what do the screws add to this? Or are the screws just to aid in fine balance adjustment?
Exactly, the hard grade 5 bearing ball provides a very small point of contact for minimal friction. The screws allow me to fine-tune the balance (in previous tops with spike tips I would file the side of the spike)
@@hiper_tops Ah alright, I think reading one of the comments prior to watching put some other idea in my head and then I wasn't completely sure if I was missing something. Thanks for letting me know and love your work!
What i think would be interesting is measuring the RPM by spinning your top by hand. Then using a small electric motor to spin it to a certain RPM and do it with every version to get a very reliable understanding of the relationship of RPM and Spin Duration. Since the Tops have different weights, maybe use a certain amount of energy and thus make it comparable by input energy. Really like your content!
Does rounding the edge really make that much of a difference? relative to the direction of motion the edges are always 'flat' (the outer edge) or perpendicular (the top and bottom of the flywheel)
@@hiper_topsFair enough. Are you targeting pure maximum time for each iteration? The last couple have not been able to match your 48 minute run And I wonder if that bothers you or whether you are fine when it is the first implementation of a feature like the balance screws
@@beardy736 It does bother me but its motivation to improve. It shows that there is more to optimising the design than material upgrades and fancy tech. There is a better mass and geometry I need to find!
@@hiper_topsI suppose materials cost and machining time prevents you from being perfectly systematic with changes (one variable at a time to see if it has a positive or negative effect). Spinning to a consistent rate of rotation in a replicable environment and tracking from there should allow you to better measure your changes
@@beardy736 Thats very true. However since each top takes 50-100 hours to make (all by hand so far) this is an inefficient method! Hence the compound changes
If you seek to go even more extreme, maybe you could consider using gold core instead of tungsten carbide. Higher density than WC and very easy to machine/pour (unlike metallic tungsten). With how small the top is the cost of the gold should not be too high either. Just a thought, but I am sure you have considered this already, with how much effort you put into this.
Have you seen the Japanese engineering game show called "Supreme Skills"? They had a top challenge, and in the course of the competition, they found that the spinning top induces air flow near its surface, and that this was a source of drag on the spin of the top. Additionally, they found that having the horizontal surfaces of the top gently round over down to the edge really helped reduce the losses. I'm looking for the one where a team of women engineers came up with the winning top that had the rounded rotor, but these episodes are hard to find. Here is one of the multiple top battles that I was able to find: th-cam.com/video/-q-hcidtjiM/w-d-xo.html Polishing the surface of the top to a mirror shine may also help minimize the induced air flow losses. A smoother surface induces less friction shear flow. *EDIT*: I can't find it on TH-cam, but TH-cam doesn't like links to other sites. Look for NHK Supreme Skills, with the episode name "Miracle Tops! Part 2: May They Spin Forever!"
I have seen this video! It was quite the inspiration a few years ago. I would like to do more tests to better understand the air flow and hence reduce my drag!
Osmium would be very cool if it wasn't crazy rare and expensive! About the low friction surfaces, I'm not sure they would perform noticeably better than the osmium! Air drag and coefficient of sliding friction are quite different
@@hiper_tops after i watched your videos i took my last few minutes before bedtime to get in a bit of research for low friction elements and stumbled upon those ... sadly u can buy them as powder
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why would you decrease the mass? That would decrease the moment of inertia when you want to maximize it. Also, using a smaller diameter ball bearing might prove better, but beware that there is a diameter that is most efficient to have the least amount of friction for the longest spin time. Trial and error will find it for you. You'd have to be careful machining it, but you could try making the spindle from magnesium instead of aluminum.
You have good intuition! The issue with mass is as follows: Breaking torque due to tip friction is ~constant throughout the spin (independent of angular velocity, dependent only on mass), where as breaking torque due to air drag has a ~^2 relationship with angular velocity (independent of mass). In theory you want a top as massive and large radius as possible to maximise energy storage. However, you must scale mass and radius appropriately, otherwise either tip friction or air drag will dominate. In this case, I increased mass and decreased radius because I was limited by the size of my raw material. This resulted in large tip friction compared to air drag. The radius was not large enough to store sufficient energy to overcome this tip friction. So it did not spin for as long as I wanted. So the plan is less mass, ~same radius and a denser material!
Ah and regarding magnesium, I would like to try but yes I am a bit worried about spontaneous combustion given I machine at university/in my home. Maybe one day!
@@hiper_topsthat’s not what he said. You would have an engine on the outside, that would interact inside the top. The entire top would technically be a motor . At least until you remove the other component. It would then just be a free spinning top. The idea is to get it spinning, not keep it spinning
Dude if your going to build a super top... add a motor and solar cell to drive the motor to keep the top running. They have micro motors that will fit in the top to help drag it to speed. Some of the micro motors will run 37,000 rpm, more than enough to keep it running for 24 hours with little power needed from the solar cells. You can use angular force to keep it running. Like sittiing on a stool and have a gyroscope turn you. You all ready have hole drilled in the sides stuff motors in there.
maybe a couple of suggestions to consider? (honestly im guessing you've probably considered them before but idk) - you had mentioned in a previous video that it still seems your battling aerodynamic drag. while you have nice polished surfaces, the top of the top isn't. im guessing that's for grip? you could definitely stand i think to have a smaller area for finger contact and have a smoother surface below it. - if you maybe had the flywheel a bit closer to a sphere shape it would give higher volume/ surface area ratio (i realize you also need the angular momentum(i think that's the right word?) to be high so idk) - this might be stupid but are there materials that have fewer intermolecular forces with air than the polished surface of the metal? - idk how much airflow that gets under the top but maybe streamlining the bottom as well?
These are all interesting suggestions. A few people have pointed out the drag caused by the knurled stem. Although a smaller and smoother stem would help, this change would be negligible as the radius in this area is very small! As a result relative air flow is small and so is drag. You are right about the flywheel shape being important; it is a challenge of maximising the moment of inertia to mass ratio without neglecting air drag. Finding this optimal curve which depends on material choice and radius is a mathematical nightmare I've been studying for years haha. About the surface, I don't think the material itself is of much importance but rather its finish (somewhere in between dimples and a mirror finish may be superior!) This is another thing for me to test Not much air drag is experienced around the tip not only because of the small radius here but because the top acts as a centrifugal viscous pump ie it sucks air from the top and bottom and expels it outwards at the flywheel :)
@thecheesybagel18589 Hi I'm quite new to your channel,and love your content! I'll add that im not anywhere close to becoming an engineer myself or have studied any of the content But if could perhaps contribute to a suggestion, id like to ask if you've perhaps considered the top and the base to be balancing on two bearings? That being said if it's not being done so in this video already?👀 Also love the idea of experimenting with the dimples design, for i know that it is used for some sort of aerodynamics of goofballs. This also reminds me of a mythbusters test where they thought of adding dimples to a car to see if it woyld be able to save you a few bucks for gas...i think it might've worked a bit aswell though! but haven't seen the episode in a while so im not to certain😅 Otherwise. Loving the content man! Looking forward to seeing you're future endeavors ( no pressure😁🙌🏻)
@@SweetPea-mh7qp When you say two bearings do you mean two bearing balls on top of eachother? They would fall over! Or maybe you mean a bearing ball sitting in the middle of a bearing? That would work however there would be quite a bit more drag. About the dimples/sharkskin, I don't think it would help (it would be worse) but I'd like to test this. The theory is that by increasing the friction drag of say a golf ball (creating a layer of turbulent flow), the pressure drag is decreased more (smaller trail of turbulent flow) so the overall drag is reduced. However since my tops don't experience pressure drag as they are stationary (no cross-wind), adding dimples would just increase friction drag.
@@hiper_tops Hey! Appreciate your efforts gone into your reply!! It means a lot Also! On the topic of the golf ball divits , it Makes sense! what i was kinda trying to get at with the ball bearings was indeed to have two ball bearings [one as the tip (shown in the video) and one inside the cavity of the base] sothat As the top spins, it spins ontop of a bearing being the contact point inside the cavity {as to hold the spinning top in place} sothat the bearing in the video doesn't have to be an entire cavity as a contact point - asuming this is the case - Hope you're doing well in you're endeavors, and am looking forward to hopefully reading from you again!
@@SweetPea-mh7qp Ah I see! I still think balancing would be difficult if the centre of gravity is above the tip (which is what I aim for). I think you may have misunderstood my tip-base contact. Although the base is concave, it is quite shallow - just enough to keep the top centred and from falling off. The top spins on it as if it were a flat surface :)
I'd work more on the polishing. You can still see many of the imperfections by eye. I wonder how much of a difference an immaculate level of polishing would do.
Check Veritasium's latest video on drag and smooth surfaces. Not sure if it's relevant here but it was counter-intuitive to me that "smooth" causes more drag than "rough".
@@hiper_tops I am a gun guy. Lol. I use Remington oil with Teflon. When/if the oil dries up, the Teflon makes a huge difference in the gun not jamming. It's thin and light but very good! Just an idea for a lube for your top.
It would probably wouldn't even spin twice as long! Even though I hand-start it at about 2000 rpm max. Thats because at high speeds, air drag becomes very significant and the rpm decays exponentially :)
@@beniaminz Yes that would certainly spin for a long time as tip friction is pretty much constant regardless of rpm! Id like to try it in the future :)
@@beniaminz Yes indeed, I currently use some oil and it helps quite noticeably for these heavy tops! Although spike tips see more relative improvement because the sharper tip radius means less area in contact with the lubricant, hence less fluid drag
I would think if you can maximize your weight and have the least surface contact, the built up inertia will last the longest. Get one machine ground out of solid carbide and spend 10 min getting it up to speed. Records will be broke.
Unfortunately the increased weight would add to the tip friction. It's a balance between maximising the inertia:mass and inertia:radius ratio (The optimal balance depends on how air drag compares to tip friction which is yet to be determined)
The coarse fingering end might be producing drag with the air, could you smooth it and use rubber wheels to spin the top? Air compression with several divets to catch the air while maintaining a low profile for low drag would be cool as well.
id like to see you spin up your tops with compressed air.
Rubies (synthetic or natural) are sapphires just with a tiny amount if chromium to create the red colour
Absolutely beautiful, I've been wanting a tungsten top for a bit now and yours is mesmerizing.
Just stumbled upon your channel. Really incredible work you’ve put into your craft. Love seeing engineering become artistry
I appreciate that, thank you!
MK19 introduction showed up in my suggested videos. Now I'm hooked. Love the music.
Beautiful engineering 👏 I really appreciate the simplicity, but at the same time would also love to see you take Mk. 22 to the next level with some kind of Guilloché engraving around the edge. Adding a conical/spiral pattern similar to a barbershop pole 💈 would not only create a cool visual effect, but also lets the audience appreciate the fact your spinning top is actually rotating! The stillness is mesmerising in its own right, but I think a mathematical Guilloché would elevate the artistry. Keep up the great work 🙌
Cool idea! I would like to add something to better illustrate the spin speed but and a bit concerned that engraving directly on the flywheel's outer edge could dramatically increase air drag. I'll consider my options!
@@hiper_tops stillness and that fact that it doesn't seem like it's moving is how you get record lasting times.
About recessed ball tips in heavy tops. Especially with carbide spinning surfaces: my experience is that the ball tip wears out more rapidly, (a few hours of spinning), then the top starts to wobble spontaneously and persistently because of this. The amplitude of the wobble increases as the ball becomes more worn out, and this wobble cannot be corrected by the screws. This wobble is not unbalance but nutation. You just replace the tip, (or rotate the worn out ball tip so that the contact point is shifted to a virgin spot of it), and that wobble disappears.
The superposition of the two wobbles, nutation and unbalance, appears in the form of intermittent wobble; I see a bit of intermittent wobble in your top. The presence of the nutation can make more difficult to fine tune the balance of the top; if you want a better balance and if you have persistent nutation, I would suggest first to replace/rotate the ball tip, for to eliminate the nutation, then it will be easier to fine tune the balance, with the screws. I found carbide spinning surfaces to be slightly abrasive for ball tips, even for ruby/sapphire and similar super hard ball tips. Maybe using glass for the spinning surface could be better in this case, at least in the sense to elongate the life of those precious ball tips, but the spin times would be reduced... not easy to find the perfect balance between all these factors..
Thank you for the insight! Yes, even with the grub screws, balancing can be a bit challenging with ball tips. I'll keep an eye out for suitable concave glass lenses, do you have any recommendations :) Also, what has your experience with heavy tops been? This one is over 800g and I think tip friction is quite significant as a result.
@@hiper_tops , little concave glass lenses should be good; I wouldn't buy expensive ones since they will become scratched, even if the tip is a ball and not spiked. I have little experience with glass, anyway. Your top should have an excellent efficiency, and, at parity of starting speed, it should spin longer than your other littler tops. If you can find a way to spin it at an higher speed than with fingers, (maybe with the help of a string or a motor), it could spin for very long, if you can avoid the hulahoop problems. If you want your tops to be spun just with the fingers, (even if by multiple twirls), based on my experience, I would say that 800 grams is too much for longest spins. My heaviest top is 847 grams, and its longest spin "only" 41 m 25 s. It has the best efficiency of all my tops but with fingers I can start it at no more than 1100-1150 RPM, while I can start my other littler tops up to about 3000 RPM, and the better efficiency does not compensate for the too slow starting speed. The optimal weight seems about 300-400 grams, for longest spins with recessed tip and multiple twirls, at least for my fingers. The farest from this weight range, the shorter the spin times.
@@hiper_tops good idea! And good comment/point by Iacopo. Hard metals like this can become abrasive on a microscopic scale due to the crystalline grain structure of the metals and different harder phases that can be interspersed within the metal. Studied die wear in metal forming and this was a real issue with some alloys.
Works of art
Any thoughts on getting a transparent plastic cylinder to enclose the top while it spins? Could increase spin time quite a bit by allowing the top to accelerate the air inside without dissipating that energy as much, and much easier to set up than a vacuum chamber lol
Although this might seem to work at first glance, it will increase the aerodynamic drag instead. The air will be slowed down heavily by the cylinder. Similarly, driving a train through a tunnel actually increases the drag it needs to overcome.
@@RowingIsFun Have a look at what Iacopo Simonelli did with is tops here: th-cam.com/video/oKxrP7-QXpk/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=IacopoSimonelli
He made an enclosure and it helped! However I find this strategy a bit dodgy/cheaty soo I'm not sure if I would implement it
@@RowingIsFuncould the train be due to needing to push the air in front of it out of the way despite being in an enclosed space where the air cannot easily be pushed aside? I would think that a train in a tunnel would have a massive amount of air pressure at the front and very low pressure behind it and that the sides would be some sort of spectrum of that
@ProfessorThock that is a factor, but the problem with the cylinder approach is that the air in the cylinder has friction with the outside of the top, but also with the inside of the cylinder. So the air around the top will move slower and cause it to stop quicker. If you make a vacuum in the tube then I expect things will be different
@@cncgeneral A vacuum would certainly be ideal, although this would change the design considerations for my tops quite drastically! A low mass, high inertia top would be preferred
Hi, James. You had a very good idea making the screws internal; you should have a bit less air drag in this way, and the design is aesthetically cleaner. Bravo !
Thank you! I am quite happy with it. I think with a better proportioned flywheel and perhaps a different tip arrangement, it could make for a very long spinner!
so unpredictably satisfying and peaceful. engineering and art
Sorry if it has been asked before but, would it not be "better" for accurately testing the tops and the effects of the changes, to use a machine to spin the top? That way you can set a specific speed or energy and see how long they spin.
Telephone line amplifiers in the countryside used to have a giant spinning flywheel for energy storage to overcome power outages. When such flywheel broke loose, it went straight through the wall and traveled quite a distance across the fields.
Flywheels can certainly store a deceptive amount of energy!
Would it be considered cheating to embed powerful magnets in the center of the top and base to lower the effect of friction? I suppose it could also make it harder to balance.
I consider it to be cheating haha although it would help
Beautiful objects. There's a purity to them and that seems to be what you're striving for.
Thank you!
I became curious what the performance per gram of mass was, and luckily you've provided the weight in (most of) your videos! So I made a little chart.
Version Weight Duration Seconds Seconds per gram
Mk.04 135g 00:25:02 1502s 11.126s/g
Mk.10 110g 00:28:03 1683s 15.300s/g
Mk.15 252g 00:38:26 2306s 9.151s/g
Mk.17 312g 00:42:08 2528s 8.103s/g
Mk.19 377g 00:48:01 2881s 7.642s/g
Mk.20 336g 00:41:43 2503s 7.449s/g
Mk.21 800g 00:40:04 2404s 3.005s/g
I put it all into a Google Sheet which I would share, but TH-cam doesn't like links.
Wow good work! It is found that lighter tops achieve the best minute:gram ratios. There are some very small "zen-ratio" tops which spin for as many minutes as grams they weigh!
@@hiper_tops I doubt such 1:1 ratios are easy to achieve. Going by these stats it would need to be a particularly light top, which in turn wouldn't spin all that long.
Still, it's interesting for me to see.
Also this latest top is particularly heavy.
@@tb_eest Yes I sacrifice this ratio for longer spin durations
These are bloody amazing,,, glad I stumbled upon your feed !!!
Thank you sir!
Someone in a top group posted a link to your channel. I adore these types of tops and great videos!
Was it itopspin :)
@@hiper_tops can't recall lol
Is there a way of making a "passive" air bearing by using dry ice? Was wondering about reducing friction but pumped air of oil sounds like cheating.
Great video! Did you try using the tungsten carbide bearing ball? If so, how did it compare to the ruby ball?
i mentioned this in a previous video: would a dented surface, like that of a golf ball, improve performance?
again, love these videos.
Came here to say the same since the author mentioned that air friction drag is the primary driver of energy loss previously.
It's been a couple decades since fluids classes, though recollection is primary drag considerations as form/pressure drag and surface/skin drag.
The dimples (or other types of surface texture) create a boundary layer of turbulent flow. For a golf ball, that primarily prevents the laminar flow from separating from the ball as early, creating a smaller low pressure zone behind the ball - sort of like functionally reducing the apparent cross-sectional area as it travels through the air.
In other applications that surface texture & boundary layer separation can increase the shear angle at the surface, which you could think of as resulting in dragging less fluid mass along with the moving surface. Some ship hulls and competitive swim suits used this, which was modeled after shark denticles (scales).
@@tswan62 Would be a good idea for the launching tip but maybe tough machining it for the main body.
@@goku445 wonder how much would be gained by texturing the launching tip, relative velocity is lower - great for grip though (like the knurling he's applied previously).
Surface texturing in a non-load bearing application could be applied in a number of ways - coatings, media blasting, etching - especially if he has the adjustable balancing in these newer models.
This would be a fun CFD analysis.
No. It's not a sphere.
Good luck balancing that
I have no idea how i found this video, but I love it! I mqke all sorts of things: knives, hammers, and I was leaning towards starting on a complete armor set. BUT! I simply must make my own top having watched several videos. I find watching them compelling. Impressive.
They are simple and satisfying to watch! And once you get keen on making them spin for longer and look at the other spinning top makers, it can be quite addictive haha
Would like some optical spinning marks; something that you can clearly see is spinning.
I thinking about putting "dots" on my little cheap one so I can judge RPM in a 60hz light...should be able to lines shift as the speed changes?
Like an old school turn table? 😬
Loving the videos, there is something really calming about them. Could you upload more of those videos where you spin the top for ~45 minutes?
Sure haha :)
Amazing dedication
thank you haha
Awesome engineering and manual machining work on this build! Have you experimented with not including the knurling on the spindle? I’m curious if you could still get the top up to speed by hand with a polished spindle, and lower your aero drag. Cheers!
I think I could but it would take quite a bit longer and be much harder to start! With such a large moment of inertia, these tops need a good grip haha. I plan on reducing the size of the knurled section though
Do one that hovers on a magnet to reduce tip friction completely
This thing is made of a heavy metal, because it’s heavy. You’d have to put in a very strong magnet to do that. Or a bigger magnet, which would then take away from its weight.
I'm not sure the the algorithm bought me to your channel but I love it. I wonder if there is anything in using an air cushion to improve the spin time. Although I don't know if high pressure, low pressure, stable airflow or unstable airflow would alter the outcomes.
It may spin longer, have a look at air bearings like what steve mould has. However its not really a spinning top in my opinion! It has to be able to fall over haha
Have you considered adding a lubricant then air pressure to the base. Add just enough air pressure so the top is lifted when it spins. The liquid lubricant acts as a seal to keep the air from escaping. You just need to increase the air pressure slightly to "float" the top above the surface. This would reduce the friction to near zero.
Fantastic work!!! To get the maximum spin time have you thought about running your top in a clear vacuum chamber? Once that is done maybe levitate your top in a vacuum chamber. I think that would give the ultimate spin time short of spinning it in space.
This channel has potential
I appreciate it haha
I’m not smart enough to know whether it would help, but have you considered dimples like on a golf ball to reduce drag?
This is already linear so there is no airflow separation, so no need to energise the boundary layer.
I have just found your channel.
Very impressive.
Do you happen to sell these?
What about a dimpled outer surface on the flywheel like a golfball?
Would it be possible to apply dimples like on a golf ball to reduce air drag?
I like that you showed something about the process of the making. At some point you used two chucks, one attached to the other; I never saw this before. You did so for to make possible/easier to drill the four holes in the flywheel ?
Thank you haha, the double chuck was a bit of a botch job, I would have just used the bigger rotary chuck but it couldn't grip the flywheel appropriately. It was a bit harder to get everything lined up with two chucks though. The bigger chuck can rotate to many different angles precisely which was handy, how do you make your holes?
@@hiper_tops , I make the holes on the lathe, like you. In my case, the simplest way I found for to measure the angles between the holes is with a trick; in my lathe the chuck is linked to a gear with 48 teeth. So I put a wedge in the 16th, 32th and 48th tooth for to keep the chuck in three positions, (since I use three screws), which are 120 degrees from each other. A piecemeal solution, but it works.
@@iacoposimonelli7191 Interesting!
I do still think that you may be well-served here to investigate alternative orders-of-operations and workholding to suit.
Specifically, it seems to me that if you can rough-machine the top, then install the tip, and then, with the tip installed and the rough top held between centers (using a reverse dead-center with plenty of lubrication) you will then be able to finish turn and polish the part with the tip on centreline of the lathe, which is not possible with the order of operations as presented in the videos I've seen so far (but of course videos may not be representative! you may already know this quite well, and so I apologize in advance for having harped on about something you've already known).
Also: I've never built a high performance top. I'm a hobby machinist who is a stranger on the internet, and you should feel entirely free to ignore what I've said becuase there may be good reasons you've already considered the idea and cast it aside. Though now you have me wanting to build a top.
Hello! This is an interesting idea, I've never used reverse-dead-centres before. I think the viability of this method depends on the tip design on the spinning top. For example, Mk.20 used a 1.6mm ball bearing and I don't think the sleeve which held it would support the whole top for machining.
I'm just a first year university student so also not very qualified when it comes to machining haha. I will keep your idea in mind!
@@hiper_tops I'm simply going to have to try, myself. :D I promise to document it somehow and share that with you. I'm not really a videographer in any meaningful sense
@@StripeyType If you see my earliest videos I am no videographer either hahaha
@@hiper_tops you've certainly grown in skill, both with the lathe and the camera!
Have you thought about putting dimples or shark skin bumps like they do for the Americas Cup racing boats to allow better laminar flow? Some watch or clock makers will make concave ruby surfaces for the Ruby tip to sit in.
The dimples help with pressure drag which the boats and golf balls experience because they move through their respective fluids. However since the top sits still, it only experiences friction drag which the dimples actually increase! I am looking into more advanced surface options though :)
Also a ruby base would be cool! I would have to check what tips would be suitable to use on it though and work from there
instead of making it the same size as your previous versions, you could take advantage of the density of tungsten another way - make it smaller so it'll have the same-ish mass as your brass tops, but being smaller will have much less drag with the same friction. that should blow your mk.20 out of the water.
In the future I will try this! I wonder what the optimal radius is for tungsten
Why don't you use magnetic levitation to remove friction? Also use some starter to give all yours Mk-s the same amount of torque for clear comparison between all Mk-s versions.
Instead of a concave base, I have used captured ring of ball bearings which both provides easily replaceable parts, and also reduces the force from friction that can be imparted onto the top.
Interesting, how come this reduces the friction imparted on the top? I would have thought having more contact points and mechanical action would create more energy loss
What about vacuum chamber? You can spin it up, then apply vacuum.
I'd like to try this! Just need to make a chamber
I could suggest a few things, but I'm not quite sure to what extent they would contribute:
First, a full Optical-Grade polishing on all surfaces should reduce friction from pretty much any source by a not-insignificant amount, say, .05micron or better.
Second, the stem knurling. That's gotta be grabbing air like crazy, so smoothing that over would be best to reduce air friction.
Third, I would find a better way to balance the flywheel while on the lathe. Perhaps mounting the main flywheel mass on the spindle before turning it down at all would provide for a better opportunity to balance it more uniformly.
Last, I would cut down on the smooth, sweeping curves on the flywheel mass. Sharper corners should present a smaller surface area to grab onto the air from surface drag effects.
Interesting suggestions. However, micro-riblets in the direction of the air flow may be better than perfectly smooth surfaces in terms of viscous drag.
You seem to describe the flywheel machining stage as I do it - good intuition!
However I'm not sure I agree with you thoughts on square flywheels being more aero. They have a larger surface area and more area at a larger radius, hence larger relative speed, pressure gradient etc drag. If there is research you have found contra to this, please let me know :)
Wow. Just found your channel. Super amazing. Have you considered including a pump-action style addition to the textured tip of the top, allowing you to consistently add torque without your fingers touching the top affecting its momentum? Or would that compromise the intent of using a top like this? Thanks so much for your artistic touch to the interesting technical marvel you’ve created!
Interesting idea! Although it may be a bit difficult to implement on such a heavy top
Reducing the bearing size sounds good but why not try air bearings or magnetic bearing.
You also said your reduce the mass, Why?
Is reducing the mass not a step backwards, or do you want to reduce the mass to reduce friction? If so, i refer to my prev comment on using near frictionless bearings and that would also change things up.
You could also consider adding a vaccume chamber and suck as much air out as possable... never seen a top made in such ways before (well a side mounted mag lev top but thats a proof of concept toy.
Good channel, please do keep it comming.
ps, you could always go the other way and create ultra light top with super thin bearing and polished like a samuri sword.
I think its interesting how many directions you can take this simple challenge. These are all good ideas what would make for a long spin however I struggle to see a way to implement them in a 'spinning top' (how would a top using air bearings fall over? The stability of a top should come from gyroscopic effects not bearings). I might think more about what exactly I'm trying to achieve but for now a vacuum chamber feels like cheating (but would be a cool experiment).
What if you made the gripped top part removable after its up to speed, to reduce air drag even more
What an interesting suggestion, however I feel like the logistics could be a bit complicated for the small gain it would give
would a convex rather than concave surface be better. less suface contact between surfaces and stability in riding to the top of the curved surface, like train wheels and flat belt pullies?
I wonder if it's possible to make a top use an air bearing. Steve Mould and Tom of Ox Tools recently collaborated on one.
Yes I saw that! it's very cool but I don't think a top could implement it - a top needs to be able to fall over and if a flywheel is floating on an air bearing it would have to be stable!
Have you considered adding dimples to the spinning top, similar to golf balls? From what I understand, it creates a layer of turbulent air around the ball, which reduces friction. It may not actually work, since the scenarios are not entirely similar, but it could be worth a try.
Dimples reduce the pressure drag of golf balls but increase the friction drag. Since my spinning tops aren't moving through the air, dimples would likely only increase friction drag. However yes I would like to test this! Perhaps if I ever get access to CNC tech
What if you created an air seal instead of a tip so that the top floats on the tip like and air hockey puck and run the air source through base up to the tip? If done correctly, you would fully eliminate tip wear... the only downside is you need a compressor like a fish bubbler or something to provide a little air pressure and flow. The top would be hovering and that would be cool.
Edit: you could use water or oil as well with a small water pump.
Have you thought about levitating your spinning top with magnets? Probably cheating a little bit too much though. The Sapphire tip will be your best option unless you want to go for diamond or a superalloy created in a lab. And spinning it on a surface as hard, flat, level and smooth as possible will help so much. Looking forward to the MK-22
very impressive machining and design here! subscribed! also, nice nail paints :)
I wonder if a dimpled surface would decrease air resistance. That's the tech golf balls and airplanes use to reduce drag.
Would a single drop of top notch light weight oil help or hinder the point of contact?
Good thinking and yes it does! Although I use an even smaller amount, about the same as a drop which has been wiped away with a finger
Would the magnetic field from earth create eddy currents and slow the top for any noticeable amount?
Also it is possible to seal off the outside magnetic field by putting your contraption in a iron box.
The thickness required depends on the strength of the field and the size of your box, magnet feild won't penetrate a wall as long as it is not saturated.
@@fakestory1753 Luckily no ferromagnetic materials and the earths magnetic field is weak enough for the non-ferromagnetic metals to have negligible eddy current losses
I was actually thinking the opposite - if you could use a magnet to pull the top upwards. This would reduce weight and friction on the tip, but keep the mass and inertia.
Now what material would be suitable for that and how on earth you would balance such a mechanism, I’m not sure.
Maybe the top half of the handle could be ferromagnetic and you could have a mechanism to center & lower a strong magnet close to it after you get it spinning.
It‘d be interesting to see how much difference it makes! I think it would also help stabilise wobbling too.
@@ConfusedGeriatric I see! Iacopo Simonelli has a video trying this and it did help the spin duration. We both consider it a bit cheaty though
I think the knurling is causing more energy loss than you'd think, even though the air speed at that surface is comparably low. You don't even use the lower half of the knurling.
Use a laser tachometer to measure initial rpm of one of your hand spun tops with knurling. Make a top without knurling that you can get going by hand just enough for it to balance, then get it up to speed with compressed air. Using the tach to ensure they both had the same initial rpm, you can see how much the drag from the knurling is really affecting efficiency.
Great video, but I'm disturbed by the scratch on one side! 😱 That can't be intentional for balance right because you'd just use the grub screws?
Many people have pointed this out about the knurling so I would like to test it! And the scratch is sadly not intentional (manufacturing didn't go perfectly smoothly)
Is it possible to make an internal groove in the flywheel before pressing in the aluminum core, that you could add water, or ceramic beads to create a dynamically balanced top? The beads/water would naturally move as to balance the top at each spin up. (Mercury would also work if you did not use an aluminum center, but is a hassle to work with)
Also, do you think the Knurls are producing meaningful drag? I think you could still spin it up with a polished cone.
You may consider a beryllium center as well. Or carbon fiber.
I'm not sure about liquid in the flywheel helping the balance as my intuition says it would flow to the point with the largest radius (most leaning out) and hence would make the balance worse.
The knurls add a little drag but a negligible amount compared to the flywheel due to its small radius. A smooth spindle would be annoying to use so I tend to accept the 5 second time loss.
Beryllium is an interesting suggestion I hadn't thought of. I have considered magnesium in the past but it is scary to work with being so reactive.
@@hiper_tops take a look at balance beads for tires and the various demonstrations of it. I’m not sure it would apply to spinning tops, but it certainly works wonders on other things.
@@hiper_tops th-cam.com/video/eq263AYgyYg/w-d-xo.html
Interesting.
However, for the next video it might be better to increase the volume of the narration, especially compared to the background music.
I'll do that! cheers
I think I need a little extra explanation on the tip and the screws. It looks like there is a single ball in the middle to function as the tip on which to spin, what do the screws add to this? Or are the screws just to aid in fine balance adjustment?
Exactly, the hard grade 5 bearing ball provides a very small point of contact for minimal friction. The screws allow me to fine-tune the balance (in previous tops with spike tips I would file the side of the spike)
@@hiper_tops Ah alright, I think reading one of the comments prior to watching put some other idea in my head and then I wasn't completely sure if I was missing something. Thanks for letting me know and love your work!
@hiper_tops can u make one levitating on magnet?
What i think would be interesting is measuring the RPM by spinning your top by hand. Then using a small electric motor to spin it to a certain RPM and do it with every version to get a very reliable understanding of the relationship of RPM and Spin Duration. Since the Tops have different weights, maybe use a certain amount of energy and thus make it comparable by input energy. Really like your content!
I like this idea, I'll try it out when I get the chance :)
What is your ultimate goal for a spin time? Is there a record you are shooting for?
1 hour is the dream! But i guess geometrical optimisation is the goal
Try adding golf ball dimples on the outer edge. Just as a test
Does rounding the edge really make that much of a difference? relative to the direction of motion the edges are always 'flat' (the outer edge) or perpendicular (the top and bottom of the flywheel)
It does make a difference but you only need to round the edges a very small amount before air drag benefits are outweighed by lost moment of inertia
@@hiper_topsFair enough. Are you targeting pure maximum time for each iteration? The last couple have not been able to match your 48 minute run And I wonder if that bothers you or whether you are fine when it is the first implementation of a feature like the balance screws
@@beardy736 It does bother me but its motivation to improve. It shows that there is more to optimising the design than material upgrades and fancy tech. There is a better mass and geometry I need to find!
@@hiper_topsI suppose materials cost and machining time prevents you from being perfectly systematic with changes (one variable at a time to see if it has a positive or negative effect). Spinning to a consistent rate of rotation in a replicable environment and tracking from there should allow you to better measure your changes
@@beardy736 Thats very true. However since each top takes 50-100 hours to make (all by hand so far) this is an inefficient method! Hence the compound changes
If you seek to go even more extreme, maybe you could consider using gold core instead of tungsten carbide. Higher density than WC and very easy to machine/pour (unlike metallic tungsten). With how small the top is the cost of the gold should not be too high either. Just a thought, but I am sure you have considered this already, with how much effort you put into this.
Have you seen the Japanese engineering game show called "Supreme Skills"? They had a top challenge, and in the course of the competition, they found that the spinning top induces air flow near its surface, and that this was a source of drag on the spin of the top. Additionally, they found that having the horizontal surfaces of the top gently round over down to the edge really helped reduce the losses.
I'm looking for the one where a team of women engineers came up with the winning top that had the rounded rotor, but these episodes are hard to find. Here is one of the multiple top battles that I was able to find: th-cam.com/video/-q-hcidtjiM/w-d-xo.html
Polishing the surface of the top to a mirror shine may also help minimize the induced air flow losses. A smoother surface induces less friction shear flow.
*EDIT*: I can't find it on TH-cam, but TH-cam doesn't like links to other sites. Look for NHK Supreme Skills, with the episode name "Miracle Tops! Part 2: May They Spin Forever!"
I have seen this video! It was quite the inspiration a few years ago. I would like to do more tests to better understand the air flow and hence reduce my drag!
Still think you should smooth out the handle to decrease its air drag, also probably make it shorter
He has to spin it for two minutes . Clearly there is a reason he’s kept the same design for many iterations
Top notch tops!
mk22 is :outer layer made out of osmium, friction surfaces made out of AlMgB14 and TiB2 ?
Osmium would be very cool if it wasn't crazy rare and expensive! About the low friction surfaces, I'm not sure they would perform noticeably better than the osmium! Air drag and coefficient of sliding friction are quite different
@@hiper_tops after i watched your videos i took my last few minutes before bedtime to get in a bit of research for low friction elements and stumbled upon those ... sadly u can buy them as powder
neat
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why would you decrease the mass? That would decrease the moment of inertia when you want to maximize it. Also, using a smaller diameter ball bearing might prove better, but beware that there is a diameter that is most efficient to have the least amount of friction for the longest spin time. Trial and error will find it for you.
You'd have to be careful machining it, but you could try making the spindle from magnesium instead of aluminum.
You have good intuition! The issue with mass is as follows:
Breaking torque due to tip friction is ~constant throughout the spin (independent of angular velocity, dependent only on mass), where as breaking torque due to air drag has a ~^2 relationship with angular velocity (independent of mass).
In theory you want a top as massive and large radius as possible to maximise energy storage. However, you must scale mass and radius appropriately, otherwise either tip friction or air drag will dominate.
In this case, I increased mass and decreased radius because I was limited by the size of my raw material. This resulted in large tip friction compared to air drag. The radius was not large enough to store sufficient energy to overcome this tip friction. So it did not spin for as long as I wanted.
So the plan is less mass, ~same radius and a denser material!
Ah and regarding magnesium, I would like to try but yes I am a bit worried about spontaneous combustion given I machine at university/in my home. Maybe one day!
@@hiper_tops for machining you can buy a magnesium alloy with a percentage of other metals in it to reduce combustibility. It is very safe.
I think that you should add a copper core so that you can make a little three phase engine that can help you to start it
I don't plan on adding engines to my tops but that would be very cool haha
@@hiper_topsthat’s not what he said. You would have an engine on the outside, that would interact inside the top. The entire top would technically be a motor . At least until you remove the other component. It would then just be a free spinning top. The idea is to get it spinning, not keep it spinning
@@jamesbizs Ah I see yes I misunderstood that. I could do this to spin it up but I might as well use a drill haha
very soothing!
small improvement point: the music is a tad loud in this one.
keep on the cool work!
Thanks! Yes that was a balancing mistake woops
Dude if your going to build a super top... add a motor and solar cell to drive the motor to keep the top running. They have micro motors that will fit in the top to help drag it to speed. Some of the micro motors will run 37,000 rpm, more than enough to keep it running for 24 hours with little power needed from the solar cells. You can use angular force to keep it running. Like sittiing on a stool and have a gyroscope turn you. You all ready have hole drilled in the sides stuff motors in there.
Why
Try spin in vacuum chamber! I think without areodamic braking the spin time will be dramatically increased. (Maybe for hours!)
maybe a couple of suggestions to consider? (honestly im guessing you've probably considered them before but idk)
- you had mentioned in a previous video that it still seems your battling aerodynamic drag. while you have nice polished surfaces, the top of the top isn't. im guessing that's for grip? you could definitely stand i think to have a smaller area for finger contact and have a smoother surface below it.
- if you maybe had the flywheel a bit closer to a sphere shape it would give higher volume/ surface area ratio (i realize you also need the angular momentum(i think that's the right word?) to be high so idk)
- this might be stupid but are there materials that have fewer intermolecular forces with air than the polished surface of the metal?
- idk how much airflow that gets under the top but maybe streamlining the bottom as well?
These are all interesting suggestions. A few people have pointed out the drag caused by the knurled stem. Although a smaller and smoother stem would help, this change would be negligible as the radius in this area is very small! As a result relative air flow is small and so is drag.
You are right about the flywheel shape being important; it is a challenge of maximising the moment of inertia to mass ratio without neglecting air drag. Finding this optimal curve which depends on material choice and radius is a mathematical nightmare I've been studying for years haha.
About the surface, I don't think the material itself is of much importance but rather its finish (somewhere in between dimples and a mirror finish may be superior!) This is another thing for me to test
Not much air drag is experienced around the tip not only because of the small radius here but because the top acts as a centrifugal viscous pump ie it sucks air from the top and bottom and expels it outwards at the flywheel :)
@thecheesybagel18589
Hi I'm quite new to your channel,and love your content!
I'll add that im not anywhere close to becoming an engineer myself or have studied any of the content
But if could perhaps contribute to a suggestion, id like to ask if you've perhaps considered the top and the base to be balancing on two bearings? That being said if it's not being done so in this video already?👀
Also love the idea of experimenting with the dimples design, for i know that it is used for some sort of aerodynamics of goofballs. This also reminds me of a mythbusters test where they thought of adding dimples to a car to see if it woyld be able to save you a few bucks for gas...i think it might've worked a bit aswell though! but haven't seen the episode in a while so im not to certain😅
Otherwise. Loving the content man! Looking forward to seeing you're future endeavors ( no pressure😁🙌🏻)
@@SweetPea-mh7qp When you say two bearings do you mean two bearing balls on top of eachother? They would fall over! Or maybe you mean a bearing ball sitting in the middle of a bearing? That would work however there would be quite a bit more drag.
About the dimples/sharkskin, I don't think it would help (it would be worse) but I'd like to test this. The theory is that by increasing the friction drag of say a golf ball (creating a layer of turbulent flow), the pressure drag is decreased more (smaller trail of turbulent flow) so the overall drag is reduced. However since my tops don't experience pressure drag as they are stationary (no cross-wind), adding dimples would just increase friction drag.
@@hiper_tops
Hey! Appreciate your efforts gone into your reply!! It means a lot
Also! On the topic of the golf ball divits , it Makes sense!
what i was kinda trying to get at with the ball bearings was indeed to have two ball bearings [one as the tip (shown in the video) and one inside the cavity of the base] sothat
As the top spins, it spins ontop of a bearing being the contact point inside the cavity {as to hold the spinning top in place} sothat the bearing in the video doesn't have to be an entire cavity as a contact point - asuming this is the case -
Hope you're doing well in you're endeavors, and am looking forward to hopefully reading from you again!
@@SweetPea-mh7qp Ah I see! I still think balancing would be difficult if the centre of gravity is above the tip (which is what I aim for). I think you may have misunderstood my tip-base contact. Although the base is concave, it is quite shallow - just enough to keep the top centred and from falling off. The top spins on it as if it were a flat surface :)
I am becoming increasingly worried about global safety. You must be topped. u_u
Do you sell your tops?
Not at the moment, it just wouldn't be economical because they take so much time and effort to make! Maybe one day :)
I'd work more on the polishing. You can still see many of the imperfections by eye. I wonder how much of a difference an immaculate level of polishing would do.
I agree with you. I was unfortunately a bit rushed finishing this top. I can definitely do better :)
Check Veritasium's latest video on drag and smooth surfaces. Not sure if it's relevant here but it was counter-intuitive to me that "smooth" causes more drag than "rough".
Can't wait for an osmium top
If I'm ever a billionaire I'll get back to u on that haha
Why carbide? Why not real deal tungsten? Another 3-4 g/cm^3 there.
Carbide is just for the tip as it is hard. The flywheel is 80-20 tungsten copper. This is just about soft enough for me to machine!
@@hiper_tops Don't know how I didn't pick up on that. I usually pay better attention
That's a lot of work
You are amazing
I think this would have spun a lot longer... had the aphids not be colluding to add extra friction about the contact point!
You need dimples like a golf ball toneeduce air drag
Keep it up mate, keep that brain busy!
Beautiful! I noticed moisture when you removed the top from the base at the end. Was that a lubricant? If so, what kind was it?
Thank you! Yes, I use lubricant - it is helpful for such heavy tops. It is some kind of mineral oil I believe. It came with the ruby tip!
@@hiper_tops I am a gun guy. Lol. I use Remington oil with Teflon. When/if the oil dries up, the Teflon makes a huge difference in the gun not jamming. It's thin and light but very good! Just an idea for a lube for your top.
@@adrielburned6924 I'll look into it! Lube is definitely more important with this top as it is so much heavier than my previous ones :)
I wonder how long it will spin if you Spin it with a dremel at 30k
It would probably wouldn't even spin twice as long! Even though I hand-start it at about 2000 rpm max. Thats because at high speeds, air drag becomes very significant and the rpm decays exponentially :)
@@hiper_tops Allright 👍In a vacuum and with super hard surfaces to spin on it. The spin time would be crazy i think
@@beniaminz Yes that would certainly spin for a long time as tip friction is pretty much constant regardless of rpm! Id like to try it in the future :)
@@hiper_tops Maybe a little bit of grease or oil will help to reduce the friction
@@beniaminz Yes indeed, I currently use some oil and it helps quite noticeably for these heavy tops! Although spike tips see more relative improvement because the sharper tip radius means less area in contact with the lubricant, hence less fluid drag
I would think if you can maximize your weight and have the least surface contact, the built up inertia will last the longest. Get one machine ground out of solid carbide and spend 10 min getting it up to speed. Records will be broke.
Unfortunately the increased weight would add to the tip friction. It's a balance between maximising the inertia:mass and inertia:radius ratio (The optimal balance depends on how air drag compares to tip friction which is yet to be determined)
The coarse fingering end might be producing drag with the air, could you smooth it and use rubber wheels to spin the top? Air compression with several divets to catch the air while maintaining a low profile for low drag would be cool as well.
This might be my favourite one so far! I love the use of set screws for balance, almost like the balance wheel in a clock movement. Nice nails btw
I am satisfied with this video content please
Too much downwards friction is putting you at a local maximum
What mass do you think may be optimal? You have a good point
Al u minum ?
Painted fingernails ?
Machinist sure have changed !
Magnetic suspension🫠🤔
Is it even a top at that point?
@@delphicdescant Exactly, would be cool for sure though. Also, eddy currents and magnetic losses would create some breaking torque, though small.
Suspect the braking effect would actually be considerable, unless more exotic materials where used.
My man, the music is louder than you.
Yes that was my mistake! I'll balance it better next time
Your voice is extremely low. The music is also very loud in absolute terms, you need to fix both
stop changing 2 variables at the same time !! (keep the tungsten flywheel go back to your sharpened tip !!)
Very true! I just get too excited to try new things haha
why wear nail polish?
Didn't mean for it to be so distracting lol Its just another way to express myself