Lazy Susan table made from skateboard trucks

Studio Mauerer Hendrichs's lazy-susan table makes ingenious use of iconic skateboard trucks and a glass top to provide the mechanical back-end for the system. Lovely. (But expensive and ripe for a homebrew remake!)

Three Sixty Table

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FoetusNail

A field of opposing Neodymium magnets? Just be careful with credits cards and ferrous objects.
gogglesnan

What is more obscene than the price is all the Monday morning quarterbacking. The idea is simple and brilliant. Props.
Takuan

Monday? I fear you are deluded.
elevatedprimate

I played with this table in the store about a year ago. There’s no need for a central spindle or glue of any kind to secure the glass top. The skateboard wheels are grippy enough to hold it in place very nicely. The top COULD be knocked off with enough effort, but it’s pretty heavy. When you’re just turning it and using it as a table ought to be used, it’s surprisingly stable and smooth.

$1,800 is silly, though.
Takuan

heh! a serendipitous roller table
http://design-milk.com/roller-table/
Anonymous

Jim O’Connell, crafters of my acquaintance don’t generally consider it stealing if you make something that looks the same as something they made.

Nanner: The Bearing Sea is very cool.

I agree with a couple of posters… the execution is so plain that it looks like *this* is the weekend basement knockoff version.

I think the glass plate will drift offcenter with time, just because the trucks won’t be perfectly aligned and perfectly non-drifty, but maybe it’ll drift slowly enough not to be a hassle?
cha0tic

@CVR #23
It’s not for passing food. It’s for Coke snorting competitions. You chop a line of coke round the edge of the table. One person starts snorting and the other person starts turning. The winner is the one that gets furthest round the circumference.
ndn

I need to build one that will hold 2 people.It’s for a film shot, not a dinner for the devil gathering.
Any suggestions for what to use to support up to 300 lbs.? I figure 3/4 plywood onto 3/4 plywood with maybe just a center bolt and rubber tires inbetween.
It would need to be 2-3 feet diameter, and will be used outdoors on a beach scene.
Who else has a visual mind?
Takuan

ball bearings are too expensive. Modify a cheap coffee table with a plywood disk with half inch plastic pipe edging filled with glass marbles from the toy store. Plexiglas for the top. Or use plexi for the bottom as well and have it lit from below with a diffused colour wheel. Or strings of annoying xmas lights. Some white plastic Go-Go boots and you’re set. (cue the space girl dance)
FoetusNail

This is ingenious and I would love to have one, but for 1800 bucks one would expect the legs to be mitered.
Takuan

the whole point about being an artist is you eventually end up managing your name.
kiltreiser

That looks very cool but a tad unstable. I suppose having food, etc. weighing down on the glass will keep it in place but I could see a lot of very expensive breakages happening…
a_user

I’m thinking Ikea round table as a base + 1 for donor parts + 3 skateboard trucks

a lot cheaper than $1,800
Takuan

how about a circular tray/sea of ball bearings with glass top?
Anonymous

careful homebrewing this, you might break copyright ;)
karrock

“Sea of ball bearings” just sounds awesome for some reason, but wouldn’t a sea of ball bearings allow the table top to slide every which way but loose on the X-Y plane? And eventually Y…

A design of that kind would have require the tabletop surface to be framed in or anchored somehow.
jonathan_v

I saw this in that store a few months ago – it works amazingly well as a lazy susan…

but it was definitely overpriced.

iirc, it was independent trucks.
Tamidon

I think I’ld want a central spindle of some sort.

A lazy susan style table on a bed of ball bearings sounds great
error404

The problem is that designers are behaving as if they are fine artists, that each item they design is a single perfect snow flake of their super special essence.

Which is not what design is about.

Make the ting, make it better than it was, make it better and cheaper, make the thing make it better and cheaper.Cooler too!…bonus.

When you start beleiving that your 6 bits of 2×4 a disc of glass and skate board trucks are high art you have lost your way.

It is a cool design and it works well, but the asking price shows,to my mind,a genuine contempt for the buyer.

So I say it’s OK to make your own coffee table, as the designer of this has made it abundantly clear that he despises the common herd.

Besides which, if you make one, then it is not ripping off , if you make them then sell them as originals then that is theft.

theft from a greedy fool but stealing none the less.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  When you start believing that your 6 bits of 2×4 a disc of glass and skate board trucks are high art you have lost your way.
  
  We should value craft above art. Something well-designed that I can use is much more valuable than something that I hang on a wall to look pretty.
nehpetsE

FoetusNail , January 14, 2009 6:22 AM

“Or maybe a fat groove or rails at the circumference with large evenly spaced rubber balls.”

Nomination for best comment of the day when taken out of context.
It sounds like the description of an alien pleasure droid.
As in:
“I can really get my dordbleaks in to the juicy fat groove, and the evenly spaced rubber balls make my wongjib dribble!
Roburrito

Now I know what I can use all of my spare parts for.
ck

You mean this isn’t homebrew?
nanner

cool idea, i am filing that away in my “To Make” pile ;)

The ball bearing idea seems cool but i think it would scratch the glass and the glass could potentially be pushed right off the bearing sea (think Toddler)unless there was a raised edge
CVR

Why would I want to slide my dinner plate around in front of somebody else at the table? If I know the person that well, I’d probably just shovel the food right in his or her mouth with my flatware and be done with it.
entropy

I think the table would not go sliding off because of the way the wheels are positioned, so there is no need for a central spindal.

Ball bearings on the other hand would require a cage or race for each bearing, if they were loose they could touch each other like gears and would lock up. Because the bearings can spin any which way, the glass would need a spindle of hold down of some sort.
dacian

i saw this idea before and i always wondered how is the glass stuck to the wheels? i can’t see any glue anywhere. does the glass slide on the floor if pushed?
nice idea and execution, of course, but the price is obscene.
FoetusNail

Or maybe a fat groove or rails at the circumference with large evenly spaced rubber balls.
Anonymous

That seems to have oddly long legs for a lazy susan.

I always thought it was supposed to fit in the inside of your regular circular table and you put serving dishes on it and then, when someone wants a dish on the far side of the table they can just go, “Stand back, I got this,” and everyone else claps as he gingerly (or not, if he’s drunk) rotates the centrepiece. Once the dish is right in front of your seat, you spoon the contents of the bowl onto your plate.

It’s “lazy” in terms of “susan” not having to get up and walk the bowl over to you.
Jugsi Funny

I would like a table like this in my room. DO they do for roller blades? It would be interesting to see:)
Takuan

air hockey? Or a pool of mercury with downdraft venting? I myself keep a vast table with brazen surface floating on a pool of blood, the legs of femurs and skulls mortared with the tears and sweat of my vanquished foes… it’s really good for bridge night.

Quick poll: how many here play bridge?
error404

“designer” furniture is always this sort of crap.

I remeber seeing the sheet metal chairs in Ron Arads wirkshop and being told they were Â£10,000 each in 94.

Any one with access to cutting and weldign kit could make one for the cost of a sheet of steel.

And the Rover car seat soa and chair , again about the ten K mark which you could make from scaffolding and car seats for next to nothing.

I have an honours degree in this crap and am always appalled at the simple things people design and seem to confuse their phone number with the price.

That table could be done here and now from stuff I have kicking about for free.
Jim O’Connell

Rather than just steal, er, homebrew the design, why not be inspired by it and come up with something as compelling and thought-provoking, but original?

$1800 for an innovatively-designed, well-made original table is peanuts.

Why is it OK to rip off designers, but not crafters? You don’t, after all, see people saying “$25 for a felt hat? I could make that for $5″ every time Boing Boing posts some crafter’s creationâ€¦
Takuan

how much energy is required to sustain a magnetic field intense enough to diamagnetically leviate a couple of beers and a deck of cards? More than six double-As?
ill lich

ADDED BONUS: you take the glass top off, turn the base over, and use it as a mini merry-go-round for the kids.