My Little Pony Wind Spinner (2009)

Next to all the fantasy related items I am also capable of making completely different themes things.
Like this My Little Pony Wind Spinner, which I made for a little girls birthday:

When the wind blows the my little ponies spin around.

I started out with some sketches, to figure out the size. Then I calculated and designed my own gears for this project. I wanted to make them rounder to fit the kiddy theme.
For the body I used my drawings and used cut out parts as a template so I could transfer them to wood.

After some sawing and gluing the body of the spinner was ready:

The wooden body before using a Dremel to grind lines in the "feather" tail.

The My Little Ponies were drawn on scale on a piece of paper, which was glued on a piece of wood.
Then they were sawn out using a fretsaw. The paper was sanded off and the lines were drawn back after a white primer was applied. Then is was a small painting job to make them look like the actual MLP's.

5 MLP's to go on the spinner. Don't ask me for their names. I took the example from stickers.

Next to the ponies, it was also time to paint the body. I used white spirit based paint, because it's an outside project.

This means every color needs at least a day to dry.

The colored body.

After painting the parts could be put together and the gears had to be aligned properly otherwise the spinner wouldn't spinn.

A detailed shot of the home made gears.

As you can see I also added some plastic rhinestones to make it more appealing for a little girl.

Another important part were the wings of the spinner. I made 6 pieces in 3 colors, matching the themed colors; white, purple and pink.
The wings were made from crafting foam.

The paper template for the wings.

Glue the bottom parts first, then glue the top parts together.

As a finishing touch add a circular shape, to cover up the glue line of the last wings.

I put the whole spinner on a stick of +/- one meter. I painted it white, then added some tape diagonally around it. The remaining white was painted deep pink. After that the tape was removed, making it look like a candy-cane.
Between the body and spinning disc a bearing is placed to prevent friction as much as possible. None the less it still needs quite some wind to spin, because it's made from wood instead of plastic.

 When everything is put together, this was the finishing product: 

There is also a testing video which was made to check if it would spin in the wind. It did, but there wasn't enough steady wind, that day, to keep it spinning. Therefor I made another video where I held it in font of a fan on full speed.
Resulting in this out of control video:

Note that it looks quite wobbly, but it wasn't lined out and glued tight yet.