I saw a yoyo for sale, never mind where, and it is called “Spintastics space monkey professional aluminium steel yoyo with long spin bearing axle and extra string”
It looks decent for 30 bucks and I’m wondering, can this be an actual bimetal?
Yes, it’s a bimetal. I saw some discussion on these a while back, I think they were actually under $20 at the time if you can believe it. Dylan Kowalski made a video on one of these yoyos earlier in the month:
I bought one of these for my son back in the day before I even knew what a bimetal was. It is so weird that it ships responsive! At the time we were just beginning to figure things out (as in, I was buying random yoyos from amazon which is a pretty risky business, before I learned about real yoyo stores like YYE) and I figured, hey, fancy inexpensive metal responsive, I dunno…
I think I understand why it does ship responsive though, the plague of “this yoyo is broken, it won’t come back! ONE STAR ” reviews you see on mainstream product websites for unresponsive yoyos …
As I side note, I have a theory as to why many of the yoyos on amazon ship in responsive configuration even when they include an unresponsive bearing in the box, even though here and on youtube there seems to be a preference for unresponsive play. e.g. there are many examples of people who change out the bearing first thing on yoyos like these or something like the Sherpa.
My theory is that anyone interested in mass marketing a yoyo has learned from observation that the majority of buyers only understand and expect responsive play and are likely unwilling or unable to spend the time and effort to research how to bind or replace the bearing. Those who are active in communities like this who have a preference for unresponsive are probably also well versed in bearing maintenance and will happily just swap the bearing first thing if they don’t like it for whatever reason. Or, to say it another way, it’s a tactic to try to insulate sellers from the negative reviews of people who are just under-informed. There are just so many negative reviews like, “Doesn’t work” or “Won’t come back”.
We had this one set up responsive as shipped for quite a while, until we brought it to yoyo club and people were like whyyyyy is this set up responsive??