> What we’ve been more cautious about sharing at this stage are the manufacturing and process details, since the project is still in its early phase. I understand that this can sometimes come across as being less transparent, and that’s a fair concern.
It's not necessary to tell all the details, everyone has a secret sauce. Also some details are boring. Other details change too much.
> One example that genuinely surprised us during testing was that laser engraving caused slight deformation, which affected how smoothly the ring could spin. Because of that, we decided to move to a different engraving method to preserve performance.
That's very interesting! Ensure to add it. Can you rectify the ring after the laser engraving? Is the engraving customized and it is the last step?
We originally planned to use electro-etching to put the Spinity logo on every ring by default. In hindsight, that wasn’t a great idea for a brand that’s just being born.
One user even joked that when the ring spins, “spinity” sometimes reads like “stupid” — which was a very fair reminder that branding should earn its place, not demand it.
So we took the community’s advice and removed the default logo entirely. The outer surface is now intentionally left blank, which also aligns better with our minimalist design philosophy. Engraving is only done when someone explicitly requests customization.
That’s why, process-wise, engraving is always the very last step. If something goes wrong there, the part becomes scrap — which is painful, but it’s the only way we’ve found to preserve predictable spin performance in such a thin system.
In the public demo images, we also deliberately hide what we consider our main structural innovation: the internal ball-loading port on the inner ring. The opening is just slightly larger than the bearing balls (around 1.3 mm), and that detail is what allows us to compress the total ring thickness down to about 2 mm.
One of my favorite moments was a user telling us they had tried to 3D-print a bearing ring themselves and couldn’t get it to work — which makes sense. At this scale, additive manufacturing just doesn’t hit the tolerances needed for consistent motion.
Thanks for pushing me to be more open. I’m still learning how to balance protecting early-stage process details with showing genuine respect for a technically-minded community like HN.
It's not necessary to tell all the details, everyone has a secret sauce. Also some details are boring. Other details change too much.
> One example that genuinely surprised us during testing was that laser engraving caused slight deformation, which affected how smoothly the ring could spin. Because of that, we decided to move to a different engraving method to preserve performance.
That's very interesting! Ensure to add it. Can you rectify the ring after the laser engraving? Is the engraving customized and it is the last step?