Monday 11 January 2016

Painting Carousels

Having noticed them in the very first post on this blog, a couple of people have asked how I went about making my painting carousels. When I made them I posted some pictures to my Facebook page and on The Guild, so this may be familiar to some of you.

I only took photos when I made the first one. During construction I learned a thing or two and modified the construction for numbers two and three. I'll discuss those changes at the bottom.

First, the materials. I used some balsa wood, a cardboard tray acquired from the supermarket, the bottom half of a smallish box, a TV turntable and a hot glue. The most expensive of these is the turntable. I got mine from Ebay for £3-4 each. The turntable is not in this picture, but you can see it below.




Using lots of hot glue I started off sticking things together.

 




I used an old turntable, that had done duty in the spray booth and so was covered in grey primer.




 


To stop paint bottles on the lowest level falling off I added some side bars.


 






 And the finished carousel with paint bottles on it.


 


It worked well but I found that each level was not sufficiently higher than the one below and I was finding it awkward to read the labels on the bottles. So numbers two and three ended up with double layers of balsa to raise them up more.

You can see that I also found that there was no need for a cardboard tray for the upper level,


 


That's it, very simple really and they took about 15 minutes each to make. They do the job, the only slight annoyance is that once a few are taken off the carousel the others can fall about a bit, but the carousels are much cheaper than buying the commercially available ones.

If anything is not clear, or you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will do my best to answer them.

EDIT - Postscript. Lately there has been a lot of traffic to this topic. Please note that if I were making a carousel now I would do it differently. Please check out my post "Round and Round we go" (27th January 2016) about 'lazy susan' bearings.

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