This entry is going to go into detail on how I got K4’s dome to spin. The secret ingriedient here is a Lazy Susan Rockler bearing. This bearing allows you to mount something to one of two concentric rings, which will then spin inside of the other ring. In this way I can attach the bearing to the body of K4 and then have bolts stick up which will attach to the dome and allow it to spin. Here is a picture of the bearing:
In order to make the ring work, what you actually have to do is drill out the holes on the inner ring. Normally those holes are just for some rubber feet which are used to hold up whatever platter you’d put on it. In our case, since we need to put bolts all the way through them. This is a pretty simple task, though – the ring is made of aluminum and is mostly drilled already. Then it’s simply a matter of placing the bearing on top of the body, marking the holes and drilling them out, and finally putting the bolts through the holes. Below is the bearing attached to the body, with some small pieces of wooden being used temporarily as spacers.
With these bolts sticking up out of the bearing you can see how the ring the dome will be attached. In order to make sure I got the bolts lined up with the holes I would then drill out of the dome, I applied a little bit of nail polish to the bolts and then placed the dome on top of it. The pieces that attach to the dome are actually two parts: a sort of a skirt piece, which comes down and hides the rockler bearing, and then the dome itself. In this next picture you can see the skirt piece placed atop it. When I got the skirt it was one solid circle of plastic which needed to be cut out – which was significantly more of a pain than you might think, seeing as I can’t get it under a band saw or anything like that, I was forced to use the dremel.
The final step to get the dome on was to cut a circle out of plastic which the dome would be glued to. Since the dome I bought didn’t have any pieces inside of it to give it rigidity or to allow mounting, it was necessary for me to cut one. To do this I cut a circle slightly larger than the inside diameter of the dome and then used the dremel to slowly bring it down to the right size. This was simple, but extremely slow and tedious process. There are many different shapes people use for the dome cutout, but in my case I opted for the simplest in a simply bar across – but frequently people make a peace sign shape or even a three pronged sort of fork shape instead.
Once this piece was on, the dome could simply be placed atop K4 and spun!