I actually don’t think titanium with steel rings is a good idea for a couple reasons.
It almost completely removes the “singing” of the titanium which is a major bummer.
It’s not really necessary since Titanium can be so thin that it’s easy to finesse the weight exactly where you want it in the yo-yo design and nowhere else, without needing to get into complex bimetal machining.
It moves the yo-yo from “expensive” (kinda the default for Ti, due to the tooling and expertise required) to “CRAZY expensive” which further tips the scales into “if you have to ask how much you can’t afford it” territory. Bimetal Alu/Steel isn’t too bad because the Alu part is mega cheap, at least. That’s… super not the case for Ti/Steel.
Crazy expensive is accurate. Also the lack of Ti singing is about the only thing that keeps this from being my #1, but my AMS Tundra and TiHawk deliver this in spades.
That’s true. But one can’t help but think that if it can be sold “on sale” for $200, then it isn’t really as gob-smackingly expensive to make as @codinghorror makes it sound.
I think YYE might be losing money on that one tbh. And anyway anything over $200-250 goes into that “if you have to ask how much you can’t afford it” territory that Jeff mentioned imo and I don’t recall ever seeing a TiSS going for even $250.
$180 and $300 are already very low thresholds. More common pricing is Ti for $300 and TiSS for $500
I’m merely pointing out that someone made a TiSS yoyo that was sold at a price of $200, brand new. Had YYB sold that directly, without YYE as a middle-man, it might not have had the markup to $350. It most certainly would not have required a price tag of $500. Then again, I admit that I have no idea what “CRAZY expensive” is in your view.
Right but that was “we can’t move this merch at any other price and we want this old stock out of our building price”, not the release price.
It also speaks to the desirability of said object. You think any A-RT titanium / steel they released would remain in stock for more than 10 minutes… ever?
Again. Pretty sure YYE was losing money selling it for $200. If they had no middleman it probably would’ve sold for $300, which is… the lower threshold. The stores aren’t making like 50% of the profits.
Also a few company owners have stated that they don’t do Ti or TiSS often or at all because they have to sell it for so cheap(which in their eyes is $200-$300 for Ti and $400-$500 for TiSS) to actually sell and they don’t make a meaningful profit out of it so its not worth it to them.
What do you suppose YYB could have sold the Heirloom for, directly, if they wanted only a modest profit? That is the real “cost” of a TiSS in the marketplace. It only takes one company to sell one at such a price to disprove the axiomatic notion that they must all be “CRAZY expensive”.
Well, the actual all-in manufacturing cost for a big run Aluminum monometal yo-yo is probably $20, $25 if that helps you understand what’s going on here.
And technically it’s even lower, since you can get a Shark’s Honor N12 for $20 … even $16… if you shop around a lot. So I expect the manufacturing cost for that one is maybe even under $10, possibly because they made a massive run.
