If you’re that worried about spin time, then the yoyo will make more of a difference than the bearing. Stick a $2 chinese KK in a Dreadnaught G and it’ll easily outspin a Puffin with a ceramic Terrapin.
what you guys don’t realize is when you clean and lube a bearing you have to “break in” again to gain best performance.
works for me.
This is off topic, but these kids at my yoyo club don’t clean bearings.
“My bearing is responsive.”
“Lube it.”
“I already did twice.”
“Here try some of mine it’s YYF high performance oil.”
I tell them every week but they don’t listen…
sigh
I do all this. I use a couple ounces of acetone in one of those glass bearing cleaners. I put the bearing in, close the cap, let it sit a couple minutes, start spinning/shaking a few more, open the container, remove with clean steel tweezers, and spin the bearing dry with compressed air. I’ve varied the soak times, spin/shake times, and how long I blow them dry with compressed air. I haven’t noticed it making any difference. In any case they are spun dry thoroughly. They are perfectly dry when I put them back on the yoyo. I’m using high-end yoyos like YYM Agonist, Draupnir, and Ares Star. My bearings dramatically decrease in performance within 10 min - 1 hour of play usually. I’m not talking minor decreases, I’m saying they start to screech loudly where they were quiet, sleep about 1/4 to 1/3 as long, and become way more responsive, usually TUG responsive in yoyos that were totally unresponsive.
My only clue is this degredation process seems to happen faster when I’m practicing 5A but I haven’t done enough side-by-side scientific tests to be sure. I have noticed several times after dropping a yoyo (on short carpet), sometimes the bearing will start to screech, etc., immediately, and other times start to screech a few minutes later. My best guess at this point is debris is entering the bearings much more quickly than it should, and that bearings with low tolerances jam up with even tiny amounts of debris. This debris could be carpet fibers or cat hair. We have several long hair cats and their fur is floating around everywhere (can’t notice unless you shine a bright light or laser through the air or something). What I don’t understand is how it gets into a closed yoyo (even a shielded bearing, though I usually don’t shield them) so quickly, if this is what’s happening.
Elluzion, have you had any success at all figuring out why your bearings don’t respond well to cleaning?
If you are cleaning Terrapin X S/C ceramic bearings just use acetone and spin on a stick and flick dry.
Only takes a minute to do…
No lube required…
That applies to all bearings
I don’t know about that. I’ve read a lot of conflicting information about acetone and ball bearings. Some information says its high evaporation rate leads to residue buildup on the balls of the bearing, corrosion, galling, etc.
My own experience is that my bearings have been rapidly degrading, and most of them I have cleaned only with acetone.
This includes my Terrapin X Wing S/C, which I clean using acetone in a bearing jar, then spin dry it with compressed air on a rod. I’ve been having the same problems with my ceramic bearings as the steel bearings.
I ordered some different solvents as well as an ultrasonic cleaner, which I just received. I plan to test out different cleaning methods and will update this thread after I’ve had a chance to see if they make any difference.
A long shot here, but everything else has already been said. 
Canned air will start shooting out a liquid that I presume is water (but may not be) with prolonged use. This is true of any air compressor (you can get an attachment that blocks water passing through the nozzle of motorized compressors), but it seems to happen faster with canned air for whatever reason.
If I’m using a can instead of a motorized compressor, I limit it to a few blasts to shoot out excess lube.
On a different note, my current process which is recently updated doesn’t use the compressed air anymore:
-
Ultrasonic cleaner, using Bio-Green solution
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quick rinse in hot water (oooo… the devil… your bearing will rust! <no it won’t!>)
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spin on a rod… I got tired of using thumb-flicks so I jury rigged something with a small R/C motor and a rubber toy wheel. This flings away the excess moisture and helps get the bearing good and dry again
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lube with a full drop or two
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back on the spinner. The high speed (something like 7,000 rpm?) gets rid of excess lube in a hurry. As soon as the bearing contacts the spinner you see it fly out of the bearing.
Depending on amount of lube used I will let it sit to break in. I have other yoyos to play… if I want to play responsive I have plenty of yoyos for that.
What I do is TOTALLY over-engineered. But it’s a mini sub-hobby that I enjoy. If that doesn’t sound like you, the simpler processes already described are just as good. My main goals for my overdone solution were:
- switch to a gentler solvent (and while researching, I stumbled across some information that it’s a good choice for ultrasonic cleaning, too…)
- find a replacement for compressed air because I don’t have my own proper compressor and cans are both inefficient and expensive. High RPM spinning does the job
- make a lazy man’s way of breaking in a bearing, because I do like to lube mine on the heavier side sometimes, for noise and smoothness benefits
while water isn’t the devil, it has a whole boatload of junk other than water in it, mostly minerals and such, which will be deposited on your bearing as it evaporates… there is no reason for this step.
Kyle
It’s a process in flux… if it’s a truly useless step, I’m happy to ditch it. Here’s why I’m not sure yet: of course there’s stuff in water, but it seems to me that there’s MORE stuff in Bio-Green and that it would be “stickier”. The rapid spin flings away most of the water, so there’s not much matter to be left behind. A trace amount of minerals are being left behind from less than a trace amount of water that actually makes it to evaporation.
The same rapid spin may or may not fling away as much of the Bio-Green… if it DOES, then the water step probably neither helps nor hinders.
Totally open to other suggestions, though. Considered seeing what those “evaporation aids” that you can put in your dishwasher would do. Again, just for the fun of over-engineering a solution.
have you tried a sonic cleaner with just distilled water rather then the bio green? I used to have a sonic cleaner for bike parts and normally all I needed was water. Some of these bike parts where crazy dirty.
Yeah, it works. Bio-Green will be more effective at taking down the lubrication (I lube my bearings), but it’s no more or less effective at dislodging actual debris.
Probably water is enough anyhow.
But the alleged problem is still the same; the step before the spinner is “bearing in water”, which is what Kyle is suggesting is not necessary. If I swap in distilled water during the rinse phase, the net result before the spinner is still the same-- a dunk in distilled water (no chemicals or minerals). I’m sure it’s an improvement either way over using tap water.
Yeah distilled water is going to have way less contaminants.
Also on the lube side we are talking chrome bike parts so covered in grease and road gunk they are black. After the sonic cleaner and water they are new looking. No grease or dirt left. Worked real good, some of the parts I cleaned where bearing, nothing as small as yoyo bearing really but still come out very clean.
I’m not trying to knock your process, I’m sure it works. You just might not need the chemical bath step. Hell I don’t even clean bearing unless I think something sticky got in there like sticker residue, in which case I use a solvent to clean them because it cleans up sticker residue very good.
Cool, cool. I’ll skip it next time and I’m sure you’re right that I’ll not even notice a difference.
I clean my bearings for one of two reasons only: they’ve gotten loud or responsive.
First thing I do when either of those happen is lube. Then again most of my bearing are what would be considered semi responsive most of the time. Like if I throw very hard(I almost never do that.) I could pull a huge tug and get he yoyo to respond.
Yeah, that’s too responsive for me. If there’s any chasing at ALL when I tug (whether it responds or not), it’s going to interfere with certain tricks I like to do.
I could still just try adding a pindrop, but ehhh… I have enough yoyos and spare bearings. I can do the swap and add them to the “needs cleaning” pile for whenever I feel like running a cleaning task.
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Yeah for sure I am the odd duck here. I really like the bearing being near silent or even silent. Also the bit of responsiveness helps with open string binds for me, since I play at low rpm almost always.
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