centering circular cake boards

December 13, 2012 10:14 PM

[geometryfilter] I have to assemble a tiered cake stand to hold cupcakes at a wedding tomorrow. The tiers and the styrofoam thingies that will separate the tiers are all circular. How do I make sure that I get each tier centered properly on the next?
posted by undue influence to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

Best answer: You can easily find the centers of each piece using a ruler (or anything that has a known middlepoint, like a thread with a knot in the center) and anything that has a right angle (like a book), with this technique.
posted by halogen at 10:19 PM on December 13, 2012 [3 favorites]

Can you drill a hole through the centre of each circular thing?
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:59 PM on December 13, 2012

How many levels are there, and how many 'thingies' that support them? If it's not too complex and is held together by gravity, you can probably just eyeball it; put it together, stand back and look from multiple angles, and adjust.
posted by jon1270 at 12:24 AM on December 14, 2012

Response by poster: Ah, with halogen's link I managed to overcome the 'how the hell' obstacle. Maybe it wasn't the most elegant method, but I ended up making pencil markings of where the styrofoam things should sit before attacking with a hot glue gun. It's not perfect, but it's done. Thank you!
posted by undue influence at 1:16 AM on December 14, 2012

Just for reference: if your forms are irregularly shaped, yet similar in density, then you can use this method to find the center of mass, which for a circle with uniform density will be the center.

Basically: hang the object from an arbitrary point, let it dangle, draw a line from the point directly vertically down to the ground. Take a second arbitrary point, let it dangle, draw a line. The intersection of the two lines is the center of mass.
posted by suedehead at 1:43 AM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]