Introduction: Spinning Beyblade Arena

Hello! We are students from St. James School in Hagerstown, Maryland. The plan behind our project design was to create more exciting Beyblade fights. We hypothesized that we might be able to do this by spinning the arena. If the arena spun, then centripetal force would be added to the Beyblades; theoretically forcing them out to the rim; after which they would bounce off the wall and rush back into the center. We believed that this would intensify fights.


Supplies

We first constructed a Beyblade arena and then attached it to the spinning assembly, however the project will also work as a modification to a standard Beyblade arena. For this reason the supplies list is split into two parts.

Arena Supplies:


Tools:


  1. 3D printer with a base of 20 cm x 20 cm or larger
  2. Hot glue gun
  3. Paintbrushes


Materials:

  1. PLA 3D printer filament
  2. Plastic Binding Epoxy
  3. Hot glue
  4. Popsicle sticks
  5. Sandpaper (Optional)
  6. Smooth-On XTC-3D High-Performance Print Coating (Optional)


Spinning Assembly Supplies:


Tools:

  1. 3D printer with a base of 20cm x 20cm or larger
  2. Power Drill
  3. Wood Saw
  4. Pencil/Pen/Marker


Materials:

  1. PLA 3D printer filament
  2. Any reasonably thin sheet of wood
  3. Metal screws
  4. Metal washers

Step 1: Modeling and Printing the Arena

To print a (roughly) standard size area with a 40cm diameter on a 20cmx20cm printer, we modeled a single quadrant in Fusion 360 and printed it four times.

After sketching a curved slope and with a rectangle at the end, we used the revolve tool to "revolve" the print 90 degrees around the center point, creating a 3d shape. The completed stl file is below.

Attachments

Step 2: Assembling the Arena

Due to warping in the prints, the four quadrants would not line up easily, creating gaps, which we decided to fill with epoxy. We used hot glue and popsicle sticks to temporarily hold the quadrants together while we applied the epoxy with paintbrushes.

After the epoxy hardened, we removed the popsicle sticks and hot glue and applied a second coat of epoxy over the cracks.

Step 3: Smoothing the Arena (Optional)

After finishing assembly, we noticed that the surface of the arena was very rough, which hurt the ability to spin of the Beyblades, especially ones using a defense type tip, which became very weak. To fix this, we sanded the arena floor with sandpaper, applied Smooth-On XTC-3D High-Performance Print Coating with paintbrushes, and then sanded the floor again after the coating had hardened. This also helped reduce damage to the arena from the Beyblades.

Step 4: Printing the Spinning Assembly

We designed 3 spur gears in Fusion 360, with a gear ratio of 1:2; the gears having 32 teeth, 24 teeth, and 16 teeth. We then modeled a baseplate with axles for all the gears. Since the full baseplate is much larger than 20x20 cm, we broke it up into three pieces and printed them separately. The completed stl files are below.

(The axle and baseplate are separate for the smallest baseplate piece to avoid the axle snapping off when the arena moves.)

Attachments

Step 5: Assembling the Spinning Assembly

First we put the three baseplate pieces on a slab of wood and marked the outline with a pencil. Afterwards we cut out the marked outline with a wood saw, and used a power drill to drill holes through the printed baseplate pieces and the wooden baseplate. Then we simply inserted screws to keep the baseplate parts in place. We placed the two bigger gears on their axles, with a metal washer underneath the biggest one to keep it in line with the middle gear.

To attach the arena to the smallest gear, we first 3D printed a small circle (the red object underneath the gear in the photo) with a diameter slightly smaller than the diameter of the smallest gear, and then used super glue to first attach the circle to the smallest gear and the arena. We ended up printing a second one of the small gear pieces and attaching it to the other small gear with super glue, and then drilling a hole through the red circle with a power drill.

Step 6: Beyblade Fights!

At this point, the project is finished and ready to be used for Beyblade battles!