10/8/2025 12 AM - Started CAD Work

Today was pretty much the whole start of my new project. I wanted to try and make a small, bowling ball spinner that's able to be carried around and just mobile powered.I do bowling a lot and I also have to clean my bowling equipment just as often, so having something that makes cleaning a 16 pound ball a lot easier will be a super good thing for me to have.

I started out with the idea of a five bearing holder, but instead of the last bearing, I'd just have a motor that rotates that ball around fast with some type of rubber or silicon grip. My whole thing today was trying to find a design that's similar to a generic spinner and then picking off of that the sizes that I'd need to make my whole CAD design. So far it's looking good for just the sketch of the base so hopefully it'll continue to get better.

10/8/2025 1 PM - Continued making CAD Design

Today was a pretty rough day, I tried to igure out how to tilt planes on onshape, but since theres so many different tilted parts, the whole thing really didn't want to work for me. I ended up spending a lot of time finding the parts that I was going to use for the spinner, I'm still looking for a motor to power the whole thing, but I ended up finding good rolling ball casters to actually spin the ball, here's to hoping they don't rust up on me when I actually get them. So far it's looking good, I'll just have to figure out later how to connect the pieces together in order to create a solid body where I can then make all the holes for my bearings.

10/8/2025 11 PM - Adding more detail to CAD

So I finally figured out how to connect all the floating pieces together. I played around with the tolerances a little bit, it looks like I'll have to make the holes a little bit bigger for the casters but other than that the whole base of the project is looking good. Yayyy midnight CADing ;) I found a model of a caster on GrabCAD so I'll be using that, I also made my own model of a bowling ball just based on standard measurements so hopefully everything will measure out correctly, tomorrow I'll probably add more of the casters and then finally start figuring out all of the electrical stuff, should be quick!

10/9/2025 - Make CAD for motor & finding BOM

Today I spent a lot of time getting more of the details on the measurements for the whole motor and where it'd be placed. Right now, I think I'm going to use zipties to secure the motor to the 3D print, so there's a small slot I made underneath the motor itself. I also made a roller that'll be wrapped in a rubber sheet to actually grip the ball and allow it to turn. Right now I have a 250 rpm motor in my cart but I have a feeling that I'm going to change it to a slower RPM since I'm not actually planning on controlling the speed but just having a switch to turn the whole thing on and off. So far it's looking good, I'll add mounting areas for the portable battery pack and the switch with tomorrow's CAD work, the rest of everything looks good so far!