A friend of mine, Robin Fawcett (you can find him here on his Treewright blog) put up an excellent video of how to make a spinning top on youtube and on his blog. I've been meaning to make one for quite a while but there always seems to be something more urgent to do first. So with Robin's excellent instructions it seemed now is the time to try it out.
Robin makes them with their own handle to launch them and this means that you can get them to run quite fast and stay spinning for a couple of minutes or more. The shaft of the top fits through the wide hole of the handle and you pull a cord wound around the shaft out through the narrow hole to start the top. The key to this is how wide you make the top, the wider it is the more energy it can absorb from the starting cord, and this is set by the size of the blank you turn. I plan to experiment a bit with this in the future.
My first top is not the prettiest one around but it seemed to work remarkably well even on a wooden plank in the woodyard. I'll need to make a couple more before I settle on a product design but I think it will prove to be quite popular.
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