Alumigo Hard alloy for Yoyos?

Anyone see this? What do you think about a Yoyo being made of this metal?

I have seen this type of material before, and always wondered if it can be used to make yoyos. Now my predictions came true ;D I think that this will be a new innovation of yoyo design, that I have not seen yet in modern throws.

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From what I see, it looks like a harder and more durable version of 7075. They have the same density, and both have excellent machinability. Definitely seems promising.

sengoku is already making two prototypes

Given that Alumigo Hard has a similar density to 7075 alloy, I would assume that it is a modified 7075 alloy, possibly with a little more copper, due to its higher thermal conductivity than 7075. That being said, there must be different amounts elements with lower densities than pure aluminum to offset the additional heavier copper. Also, since 7075 has trace amounts of other elements, silicon, chromium, titanium, etc, I would expect there to be a little more of some of these elements in Alumigo to increase its tensile strength and hardness. The crystalline structure of the metal is probably such that it may be even more adverse than 7075 to accepting dyes during the anodization process, and it probably beats up machine tooling more so than 7075 does, requiring longer, and more expensive machining time.

Just my two cents, and I’m probably not 100% accurate, since the material website is in Japanese, and they do not appear to divulge any specific chemistry details of the alloy…

db

The weight distribution this could attain would be greater than even 7075

In fact this metal is almost as strong as titanium, but far lighter. Imagine the body and walls of a Yoyo being separate from the rims. If you make the same body of titanium and Alumigo hard the Alumigo hard will be even lighter than titanium. And due to the strength and hardness of Alumigo hard you can then apply the same kind of rim weight to the body and walls. Thus making a Yoyo with greater rim weight on its own than has ever been seen not to mention a bi metal. All this too, at a far more affordable price than titanium. Just a little more expensive than 7075.

Sounds like you’re fired up on the possibilities! That leaves you two options:

  1. Make one! Work with a machine shop to acquire the right bars and tooling. You may have to pay for their research time if they’ve never encountered it before, and you may have to pay for specialized tools if it’s just a project “for you”. Expensive but potentially rewarding!

  2. Wait for Julio Robles to do his prototypes. :wink:

This could prove to be the next big innovation in yoyo hardware IMO.

The most important question is, can it be sparked?

I have a question. Before I ask the question I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I know little about Alumigo hard alloy. So what I am going to ask is not some kinda ‘bait’ quiz. I am not asking anybody to give me an answer and the I come back and say, ‘You are totally wrong’ etc.

If none of you guys knows the answer, then I am not the only guy that might wonder about this.

I have been told the 7075 is harder to anodize than 6061. Because it is much denser/harder…

What has been said in this thread about Alumigo hard alloy performance/design possibilities sounds very promising.

But since the Alumigo hard is even 'harder/and-or/denser than 7075; could it present an even bigger headache for Makers that want to Anodize it or present some other finishing nightmare?

Any thoughts?

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With my major exams coming up, I think this would be good practice.

The alumigo alloy is just as dense as 7075 so it isn’t denser. The metal is less malleable because it has a larger amount of different metal atoms so the aluminium atoms do not slide over each other easily.

However, this makes it harder to anodize than 7075 because the process for anodizing different metals (zinc, aluminium, titanium) is specific to the metal and since there are less aluminium atoms in the alloy, less aluminium oxide is formed when anodizing, thus it is harder to anodize.

I think you’ve got it backwards, if Alumigo is lighter than titanium, then theoretically the maximum rim weight possible given the same design will be less since there will be more volume of the material to “chunk” upon; or put simply within the same design and total weight, the rim has to be thicker which means some of the weight will not be “more outward” than the heavier titanium.

However, I think there is no need to have yoyos to be more rim weighted than it is today anyway, a yoyo that has too much rim weight would be clunky and might not even be playable.

Agreed. The more rim weight, the more kickback there will be (a result of being harder to impart the energy from your throw into getting the yoyo spinning).

We have enough rim weight. If rim weight was the only thing making a good-playing yoyo, we wouldn’t continue to see designs with the weight pulled in toward the middle a bit.

From what I hear, Sengoku is making a yoyo out of this already. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Earlier prototypes, will be subject to changes.
My experience tells me that what paper says can be dramatically different on practice.
We made a bi-metal and a mono metal,
Many test are being carried, will see if a mono metal is enough and discard the need of bi-metal making twins and playing with some other shapes.
One of them is hard smash the yoyo with an ultra thin walls into difeferent hard surfaces to see how thin can they be pushed without bend or breaking.
The alloy indeed feels deeferent than 7075 and is quite shiny!
Right now we are in the anodizing testing process, this isn´t being cheap, hope people likes the idea to experiment and research for innovation and support the final releases (of course they should play awesome or I won´t release)
So far is a lot of fun.

I´ll keep you updated

Those look very interesting. Very nice!

Please keep us updated on the testing process!

Looking good!

How does it play? That monometal looks pretty sharp!

I am greatly interested in them both.