Like many of us, Robert grew up with Spirograph. He’s is also involved in woodworking and wood turning. He has been putting together a pin router system that will cut spirograph designs into many kinds of wood projects.

(If the only kind of router you know is the box that delivers your internet, then you need to understand that there is also a woodworking power tool called a router.)

Carpenters use routers to shape the edges of boards. Routers can be hand held or mounted in a table, allowing you to move the wood rather than the machine.

A pin router adds a simple guiding system to the router table. The pin, aligned with the router bit, enables you to quickly and accurately copy complex patterns and shapes from a template into a piece of wood. Guitar makers and small shop furniture makers use pin routers for accurate, repeated cuts. (Learn more about them here if you’re interested.)

Enter Spirograph, and Robert Roehrig’s pin router.

He found that the die-cast metal Spirograph (which I reviewed here) is able to do things that plastic pieces are too flimsy for. (Plus, it looks cool.)

You can see that he has screwed the ring to a “sled” which he can move freely with his hands. A piece of wood is attached to the underside of the sled with double-sided tape. As he moves the sled, the wood is engraved by the router bit. The pin, visible on the top, is aligned with the router bit. Because he can’t see what’s happening, he has to trust that every movement of the sled is transferred to the wood.

When he inserts the pin in a pen hole in the Spirograph wheel, and he slowly moves the sled around while keeping the gears engaged, the router bit carves out a spirograph pattern in the wood below.

“It’s like doing Spirograph in reverse,” he says.

This next photo shows the router bit beneath the table. You can see how it lines up with the pin on top.

Here (above) it looks like he has put another piece of plastic on top of the ring that keeps the inside wheel from jumping out – a hazard familiar to anyone who has used a Spirograph.

Finally, here are some little Square Bottles he turned, sporting medallions made with the spirograph unit.

I hope to hear more from Robert about his explorations. I’ll continue to share them here.

The post Carving Spirograph Patterns into Wood with a Pin Router appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

This kit includes patterns for the shaped wheels that were selling with the newer sets on the market at the time (and are included in the new sets since 2013): the triangle, oval, cross and bar. I have made blog posts and videos about using most of these. See: Triangle wheel, Oval wheel here and here, Valentines with oval wheel, Bar wheel.

It also includes a few patterns using the mysterious Swing Marker which I wrote about here.

If you’re going to print these off, click on the images one at a time to get the highest-resolution version, and then send that to your printer. You will have to scale them down to get them to print on a single piece of letter-size or A4 paper. (Go to the printer dialog’s advanced settings and reduce the percentage until the preview shows that it fits.)

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I had a basketball, which I set in a suitably sized (crystal!) bowl to hold it steady, and proceeded to attach a Wild Gears ring (84 teeth on the inside) with putty and drew a pattern (Wild Gear 36 teeth). And to my surprise, it worked quite nicely.

I wasn’t intending to do it more than once, so I made a video of the whole experiment, which is below.

My basketball will never be the same. I used a black Sakura Micron 05 pen, which is permanent, archival and waterproof. Although I used some Wild Gears, I think Spirograph parts should also work.

Now that I think about it, though, the guy who asked the question was a wood turner. A basketball is spherically symmetrical and convex, so this might work on the convex side of a shallow turned bowl, but drawing on the inside of the bowl probably wouldn’t work as the inside ring teeth would be off the surface. An epitrochoid (drawing on the outside of the ring) might be possible, however, on a concave surface.

I don’t see it working on a spindle shape with cylindrical symmetry.

Here’s the video. Let us know if you try anything like this.

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It has been preserved on a fan website for Dr. Who, because Fisher’s company went on to produce toys based on that popular TV show.

Easier to read text is below the image.

Source: https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Denys_Fisher_obituary#tab=Description

Engineer who invented the Spirograph, the toy that enabled everyone to draw perfectly symmetrical patterns

THE Spirograph toy, invented by the engineer Denys Fisher, is a clever device capable of producing the most intricate and ornate geometric patterns. Comprising a set of coloured pens and plastic cog wheels, with rails and circles for them to run along and around, it is an ingenious and absorbing plaything that has endeared itself to countless children for almost 40 years.

The Spirograph’s wheels are of different diameters, with holes for the pen tip at different distances from the centre. With the turn of the wheel, the pen traces ornate curlicues. Eventually, the pen returns to its starting point, creating a symmetrical figure. It was said that, like snowflakes, no two patterns are the same.

Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was brought up in Leeds, spending his early years living in a railway carriage in a field. He did not shine initially as a youngster, until illness laid him up for six weeks -weeks that he spent in bed with the company of Lamb’s Infinitesimal Calculus. Fisher was captivated, and a lifelong passion for logic and mathematics ensued.

Academia was not to his liking, however, and, after dropping out of Leeds University, he joined the family firm, Kingfisher (Lubrication) Ltd, where he developed new machinery to speed up the production of lubricants while also in-venting a new way of producing delicate springs.

In 1960 Fisher left the business to establish Denys Fisher Engineering in Leeds. The firm had been going for a year when he won a contract to supply to Nato all springs and precision components for its 20mm cannon shell fuses. It was a particularly tough assignment, requiring a small clock-like spring that no other British firm at the time felt confident it could manufacture. Fisher was undaunted, and spent six intensive months researching the mechanism and developing special-purpose machinery. Duly impressed, Nato awarded him a Pounds 50,000 contract to make five million units.

The assignment gave him the security and time he needed to pursue a project closer to his heart. The Victorians had been attracted by the idea of using gears and cogs to create patterns, but their modest achievements had largely been forgotten. Fisher had for some time sought to carry on where they left off, and he spent the Christmas of 1962 building, with his family, various drawing machines from Meccano pieces. Unhappy with the results, he shelved the project -until six months later he had his Archimedes moment.

Late one Sunday night he was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and as the choral movement ended he had a vision: the new device would be made out of a series of perforated plastic cog-wheels and racks.

He hurried to his workshop where he created his prototype Spirograph from a Meccano cog and a geared ring. He had originally intended to create a draftsman’s tool, but on the advice of a colleague, he decided to market the Spirograph as a toy.

He spent 20 months perfecting his plaything, spending Pounds 1,000 patenting it in 16 countries. In March 1965 the first Spirograph went on sale in Schofield’s department store in Leeds. A feature about it on Blue Peter proved crucial, and the following year saw more than a quarter of a million sets sold throughout the UK. It was voted “UK Educational Toy of the Year” from 1964 to 1966.

Having met Joseph Steiner, the co-founder of Kenner Products -which had already successfully developed Play-Doh and was later to produce Star Wars action figures -on a trip to America, Fisher struck up an agreement with Kenner, and the Spirograph was well on its way to global success.

Spirography’s trippy, floral patterns were ideally suited to the era of psychedelia and flower power. Ovals, stars and rings produced by the Spirograph were soon found on lampshades, embroidery, Christmas cards, and -in its new year edition of 1967 -on the front of Punch. In that year a Spirograph was linked to an IBM computer in Australia, which estimated that the device could make a total of 15,625 patterns. It has sold more than 100 million units in 85 countries.

With this success, Fisher was able to sell his company in 1970. Denys Fisher Toys, as it became, went on to produce Dr Who figures before being bought by Hasbro.

Fisher settled in Dumfries before moving to Clappersgate, Cumbria, in the 1980s. He maintained his passion for inventing, and developed another drawing device, the Cyclex. He also worked with Hasbro in refining the Spirograph.

In 1940 he married Elizabeth Stephenson. They had a daughter and two sons. He later married Kate Wade in 1969. They had two sons.

Denys Fisher, inventor, was born in Leeds on May 11, 1918. He died in Furness on September 17, 2002, aged 84.

• Publication: The Times
• Date: 2002-10-26

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In addition to the patterns on the color envelope, which have instructions, the black and white instruction sheet has 70 “mystery patterns” without final illustrations, for people to try and discover.

If you want to print off one of the images below, clicking it will open the full-resolution image in a new tab, and you can print from there.

The cover envelope mentions two non-super Spirograph Refill Kits, No. 402 and 404. I assume the one we have at the above link is No. 402, so if anyone has a different one and wants to share, feel free to contact me.

The post Super Spirograph Refill Kit appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

In March 2022 I was contacted by a person named Glagolj who has mathematically described what I’ve been calling “wheel-within-a-wheel” designs made with Wild Gears.

He prefers to call it “second order roulette” as it involves rolling one curve on top of another curve. Fair enough. For me, a mystery. For Glagolj, a mystery to be figured out and encapsulated in a parametric equation.

He wanted to use the patterns I’d drawn by hand and compare them side by side with the renderings generated by his javascript plotter. That’s the ultimate check on the formula. As you can see here, it works.

The plotter can be found here. It allows you to plug in the four gear numbers of a second order roulette, and generate the pattern they should give.

Glagolj’s article on the formula is here on Github.

He prepared a couple of slideshows with some of the interesting patterns he found. These are all computer-generated, so he can use any gear he wants. Of course, working with physical gears we have to work with the ones we have. But the numbers are in the upper-left if you want to try drawing them yourself.

Here is the second slideshow by Glagolj:

Several people have suggested I try third-order roulette patterns, i.e. a wheel-within-a-wheel-within-a-wheel. Well, Glagolj is ahead of me there. Now I have to try to see if I can duplicate his computer-generated results.

The post Wheel-Within-a-Wheel Math, or “Second Order Roulette” appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

Inside a 120-tooth ring, I used a gear with 96 teeth, which has an off-center hole with 40 teeth. (I don’t remember which set this came from.)

Then I drew the pattern six times with six different small gears inside the 40 ring to see the patterns.

Looking at the math of it

Each time I got a 5-lobed pattern. That’s the basic geometry of the 120-96 gear combination, 5 loops or points, as you can see in the table here.

But there’s a lot of variation in how that 5-lobed pattern is expressed, according to which small gear is used.

Small gears used are: 32 (navy blue ink), 26 (pink). 34 (purple), 18 (green), 30 (red), 16 (turquoise).

Using the same table, looking at the number of points each gear would give in a 40-tooth ring, we see that:

• Gears 18, 26 and 34 all give 20 points
• Gears 32 and 16 give 5 points
• Gear 30 gives 4 points.

Now the differences in pattern density make sense. The three 20 point patterns (pink, purple and green) look different depending on the physical size of the gear.

The other three looser patterns make more sense if you try to count the points or loops within each lobe. Some of the points are hidden in the inner part of the pattern, so they’re hard to make out. But they’re there. You may get an idea from watching the video.

So the overall geometry of a wheel-within-a-wheel pattern depends on the larger gear/ring pair, and the density depends on the inner, smaller gear/ring pair.

Here’s the video, filmed on a sunny summer day in direct sunlight. The glass-topped patio table gives a nice flat surface for this work.

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There’s a link at the bottom to download it as a PDF if you prefer.

The post Super Spirograph 1969 Instruction Book appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

As well as the colour photos of the envelope, there was a 2-page sheet of instructions without images, “mystery patterns” that spirographers could try out. I’ve created a video exploring 4 of these 54 mystery patterns. If you’re not sure how to follow the instructions, you might like to watch it first.

The Refill Kit

To make the best print, click on the images one at a time to get the highest-resolution version, and then send that to your printer. (The full images are high resolution and may take a little time to download if you have a slow connection.)

Original post from 2019:

Thanks to Thomas Alan Blalock from my SpirographicArt Facebook Page for being the first to send pictures of the 1967 Spirograph Refill Kit.

The post 1967 Spirograph Refill Kit No. 402 appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

A good toy store may carry the new Spirograph sets made by Kahootz. You can also find them on Amazon. There are many different sets available now, so decide what you want.

All links are affiliate links, meaning I may get a small commission if you buy something.

The most complete set is the Super Spirograph.

There’s also the regular (non-super) Spirograph deluxe set:

Some of the new sets have come with artwork borrowed by the old sets from the 1970s. Don’t be fooled; these are newly manufactured.

Kahootz also uses words like “Original Spirograph” to describe its product. This isn’t wrong at all, as the design is more or less the same as those made in the 1970s. The pieces are compatible, and the sets are mostly the same.

But the new sets are newly manufactured in China, and the injection moulding processes and materials used are not quite as good as they were back in the day. The pieces bend a bit and they are built with less precision in hole placement. The old ones were made in the UK, Canada, the US and perhaps elsewhere (if you know, please tell me in the comments).

There are even cheaper knockoff versions findable online, often pared down to a small number of components. I have not tried any of these sets.

Buying vintage

Real vintage Spirograph sets are better quality. You can look for them on eBay and Etsy. They often have a few pieces missing.

If you don’t live in the US, use eBay for your country or a country near you and search for “vintage spirograph”. For example, if you live in Portugal, try eBay.es (the Spanish version). Today when I search Spanish eBay.es for “vintage spirograph”, I see several sets available, mostly from the UK, but a few from France or Germany. There are also spare parts available if you’re missing a few pieces.

Do not worry about the pens! The old pens will have dried out anyway, and they really weren’t very good. There are so many great pens available now that work much better than the old pens and come in more and better colours.

Do not worry about the pins or the pieces of corrugated cardboard that came with the old sets. They aren’t necessary. If you do want to use pins, you can cut up an old cardboard box, or even better, use a cork bulletin board. But you don’t have to use pins. You can get poster putty, which is exactly the same as the “Spiro Putty” sold with the new sets, for a dollar or two at any office supply store. Blu Tack works too.

If you really want to buy the right pins, look for “map pins“. They are short and stubby, and will hold the ring to the paper properly.

Do not worry about the paper! You can use any paper. I usually use cheap photocopy paper for playing around. But when I want to make something nice, I use fancy paper, card stock, or even watercolour paper that I’ve sponge-painted.

Buying Wild Gears

Wild Gears is a different product. I’ve written a lot about it on this website. It is not compatible with Spirograph. It is much more expensive too, as it is not mass produced. But it’s fantastic. To purchase, go to WildGears.com.

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