I’m not sure if this has ever been though of, but a random idea popped in my head while doing some chores around the house: what if metal flakes were used for strategic weight placement on yoyos?
This is done frequently to add weight to other items (e.g. golf discs) or where metallic flakes historically have been used, the material has had to change because it added undesired weight (e.g. metallic paints used to use aluminum flakes, but now use PET). I wonder if applying this to yoyos could allow for new bimetal designs, and if so, whether it would have certain advantages over the current design.
For instance, current bimetal designs are highly costly. While manufacturers are learning to improve their methods to produce cheaper bimetal yoyos (MYY Focus, Duncan K.O.), I’m curious if this method could reduce costs even further. The reason current production is so expensive is due to a couple of things:
- More pieces have to be put together to complete the body of the yoyo, cause greater possibility for error
- Bimetal designs typically push more weight to the rim. Due to physics, this means any errors are more greatly amplified.
- The above result in a need for more prototypes and more QC than mono-material designs
As for what materials would work best, I would think brass may work better than steel due to it’s higher density and lower hardness (easier to process into flakes); for plastic-metal hybrids, aluminum could be an option as well.
Regarding methods, I’m not a chemist nor an engineer, so I can only speculate what might be feasible. I think this would be easiest to implement with plastics, as the powder could be mixed into the plastic while melted fairly easily; isolating this mixture toward the rims could theoretically be done with a 3D printer, while the rest is made with pure plastic material. As for bimetal designs, I’m not sure what interaction the metals would have if done while molten. One possible option would be to apply a measured resin-flake mixture onto the raw metal yoyo while it is spinning, followed by its final smooth coat.
Whether this technique would alleviate any of the balancing and cost-related issues with traditional bimetals, I don’t know (I am really interested how this would work with a plastic/metal hybrid, though). I also doubt it could push weight distributions to their current extremes. But it was an idea I thought worth sharing.