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Cake Turntable


I've been keen to have a cake turntable for a while but couldn't seem to find a turntable which didn't wobble a fair amount. I even shopped around at a few fancy kitchen stores and their turntables also wobbled. 

All the turntables I saw had an axle as the only support which would be great if the tables used a really high quality bearing and mounting but sadly even the expensive tables used cheap components. 

I decided to take matters into my own hands and simply make a crude turntable. My difference would be to switch the support from a centre axle to a few wheels on the outside of the table to spread the weigh around and hopefully allow a smooth action. O, and NO WOBBLE!

Off to Bunnings I went with the 3 kids in tow. Bunnings is our standard Daddy daycare outing as we all have a blast playing with the various tools and imagining the projects we can work on. The kids park and free popcorn doesn't hurt either.... 

Enough distractions, back to the table.

I purchased 4 simple casters (90c each) and a board (cheap) to chop up. Fortunately we bumped into our neighbour at Bunnings and he had a jigsaw we could borrow. One less item to buy, nice.

Once home I measured out a circle and cut it out with the borrowed jigsaw.




Once the circle was cut out I fixed the wheels/castors evenly across the board. I took a rough stab at the locations using a set square and wasn't overly worried with the location as it would work out. Or that's what I reckon the physics suggests?

Then I popped a 10mm dowel into the centre of the board. I had plenty of dowels remaining from various other projects.




Then I realised that the dowel is structurally weak and can easily be knocked to the side which would cause the table to wobble side to side. There's no point making a turntable to avoid wobbling up and down when it would wobble side to side!



So I thought to lock the dowel in place by using a random off cut and drilling a 10mm hole through it.

The next problem was that I couldn't drill straight through the off-cut resulting in more skew dowels. Hmmm, what to do. 



I thought the lock would work if I could 'wiggle' the dowel around but to do so I would need a 10mm hole at the top and a larger hole at the bottom. So I took the 10mm bit and randomly drilled the base of the off-cut until the dowel had a bit of play. 


I popped the new and improved off-cut on the board and wiggled about until the dowel was perpendicular to the board and locked the off-cut in place using two screws.



I cut out a second circle for the base and drilled a shallow 10mm hole it in for the dowel to sit in.

As an optional last step I drew a few concentric circles on the top of the board so that I can place cakes in centre of the table without having to work out where the centre is.



And there you go, a working turn table :) It cost about $6 in parts to make and took maybe an hour to make although easily half of that time was spent problem solving. Which hopefully you won't have to do if you learn from my mistakes!




Feel free to pop any suggestions or comments below. I've been fortunate enough to learn from others and don't mind sharing my mistakes if it can help others.

Cheers!



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