You may have thought that fidget spinners are just another craze of the year that will die out in a few months, but that is really not what is happening. The world went crazy making them out of gallium, cookies, iPhones, gold, and pretty much everything you can think of. The little gadgets went on to explode, but that did not stop people from making other weird versions of these.
You may find the classiest looking high tech spinners, but if you want the best performance, there is none that can compete the Saturn Spinner, the one that is engineered so cleverly that it can go on to spin for 12 minutes straight.
The Saturn Spinners have been called the “Rolls Royce of fidget spinners” as they were not created by an ordinary toy manufacturer but a subsidiary of NSK which is a Japanese precision machining company. NSK specializes in ball bearings for satellites and computer drives, which explains the exceptional performance of the spinner. The Saturn Spinner is designed to resemble a ship’s wheel that has added weights to the outer ring, and the center has a very light aluminum ball bearing that enhances the centrifugal force.
The Saturn Spinners were created with such precision that any unit that did not comply with the 12-minute spinning standard in performance tests was dismantled and reassembled again until it it met the standards. The tiniest of dust particles can affect the performance, so the standards followed for manufacturing these were as strict as for any critical machine. The pristine factory workers in Fujisawa wear special clothing, gloves, and medical masks and even pass through air showers that blow off all the dust before workers enter the work space.
Toshikazu Ishii, the president of NSK Micro Precision, says, “We’re confident that ours is the longest spinner around.” The president also says that the Saturn Spinner uses the same kind of bearings used in many hard drives, providing for the most fluid rotation of all the ball-bearings the company makes.
Ball bearings are a very crucial element of many of the machinery that we use, but these are often overlooked. The reason why a ball bearing company decided to manufacture a toy is to create people’s interest in the importance of these mechanical components. “Hundreds of bearings are found in products all around us, but most people don’t see them or pay much attention to them,” said Toshikazu Ishii.
Most fidget spinners on the market can only spin for a couple of minutes and the former yo-yo world champion, Takahiko Hasegawa says that even the best of them stay for no longer than eight minutes.
Considering the effort and precision that goes into the making of the Rolls Royce spinners, the price is nothing cheap. You can buy a Saturn Spinner for 17,280 yen ($157), but the performance is clearly worth it. Afterall, people are also buying the solid gold spinners from the Russian company Caviar that cost beyond $17,0000.
