Battling Tops

Welcome to this instructable!

In this I am going to show you how to make Tops/Spinners using Tea Light Candles. You may engage more than one person in these toys or enjoy it in solo. This is a simple and quick project. My little daughter was really excited to see these toys in action.

Inspiration behind this project was to reuse the leftover tea light trays and wax from my Toy Train project.

Note: This is a better version of Spinner in 30 seconds. Make one and enjoy. It could be is a great stress buster too!

Materials

For Top/Spinner -
- 8 Tea light candles [with aluminium base]
- 4 Kulfi or Chop Stick [I prefer Kulfi stick simply because of its roundedness, giving a better grip to spin]
- Some interesting pictures for the wheel [I printed some pictures from our PRO community and some optical illusions for the background from the internet]
- Glue

For Arena -
- Cardboard boxes
- Tub lid [8" diameter]
- A4 size black paper
- Audience [printouts]
- Blue Tack
- Tape

Tools:
- Small Star screwdriver
- Hex saw
- Scissors

- Pick a candle and gently tap on its back using your index finger. That should make the wax and the pin pop out from the tray [Sometimes even if the wax pops out the pin and wick remains stuck to the tray, in which case pull out the pin and the wick from the tray]
- Gently pull out the pin from the wax and wick will come out with it
- Keep aside the tray and the wax. Discard the wick and the pin
- Repeat above steps on other candle but this time just keep aside the tray. Discard the wick, pin and the wax for this project [and use it to create something useful in other project maybe?]

Now, you should have 2 trays and 1 wax

- Pick a tray and place the wax back into it
- Using the hole in the wax as the guide, make a hole in centre of this tray using the screwdriver
- Pick the other tray and cap it on to the tray with wax. But as both the trays are of same size the tray will not fit in readily. So, the way to do this is make the tray which holds the wax smaller by slightly crimping it. Now, you should be able to cap the tray.
- Using the hole made in the tray as the guide make a hole at the centre of the other tray using the screwdriver

- Pick the Kulfi or Chop stick and mark 3 from the pointed end
- Cut out 3 stick and keep it aside. Discard the remaining part

- Cut a colourful circle of size of the wheel and paste the picture of your choice on top of it
- Stick this picture on to the wheel [referred as Sticker]
- Using the screwdriver make a hole in the centre of the sticker [since the wheel already has a hole this should be an easy one]
- Pass this stick [pointed tip first] thought the hole of the wheel till the stick is firmly inside it. Make sure about 0.7 to 0.8cm stick pops out from the other end

Caution: Do not press the stick too hard into the hole otherwise you would end up popping out more than required from the other end

Repeat this procedure for making remain 3 Tops.

- Pick the cardboard box and cut-off off the top, bottom and some of the sides. You should now have one centre piece and two side flaps
- Using blue tac stick the audience on centre and side flaps
- Make this stand on another cardboard, the base
- Push away the side flaps of the standing cardboard slightly so as to widnen the arena. It should now look like a trapezium/trapezoid
- Outline the standing cardboard on the base cardboard and mark an extra 1 inch on every side so that later this extra bit can be used for sticking the base to the standing cardboard
- Place aside the standing cardboard and cut the base cardboard along the marked outer line
- Make cuts as shown on the base
- Valley fold the extra 1 inch flap on the marked line
- Place back the standing cardboard on to the base and paste the flaps to it
- Cut a circle out of the black A4 paper big enough to fit into the tub lid
- Place the circle into the tub lid
- Place and centre the tub lid on to the base

Your arena is ready!

- Pick a Top by holding the butt of the stick between your thumb and the middle finger and give it a spin on the tub lid
- Similarly, spin other Tops one by one on the tub lid and witness the battle! [I bet you will be more than happy to see this great toy in action]

Note: At times the wheel will slip down the stick while spinning in which case the stick will have to be pushed back into the wheel firmly. But with every push you would be broadening the hole allowing more stick to pass through. There would be a time where the pointed end of the stick would be more than 2.5 cms out of the hole making the spinner to topple rather than spin. This is the time to make new wheel! I was able to get a minimum of 90 spins with one wheel.