Contest: share your most "beat" yo-yo, win a new yo-yo! [ended 11/16]

[shubham24121996 (shubham)]

A distracted teenager who just started throwing struggles to do new tricks hits the yo-yo on the ground on several occasions until he has realised his mistakes and took decisions to improve his yo-yo skills.

I remember In 2013, I bought my first unresponsive yoyo i.e yoyo officer aura from ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■. As I started practising with it I struggled to do trapeze as the yo-yo hit the ground, I failed many times and realized from my mistakes which I made till now because I was not paying much attention to the yo-yo and was sometimes distracted to watch television,or sometimes suddenly talking to people without realizing the yo-yo has been thrown and is spinning near to ground, sometimes I used to make long strings without taking the actual measurements of my body and length of the string, many other problems I faced while learning new tricks I had knots in my string, sometimes I even hit walls with my yo-yo that would have happened due to small space, now I always make sure that I always make space stretching my both hands so that I can create the space utilized by my yo-yo while performing tricks. and I sometimes hit myself with the yo-yo that may be due to bad response pads.infact of the yo-yo got many blemishes and damages I am not ashamed of myself,I am proud that i made the mistakes and learned from them and I still love my yo-yo and treat it equal to all my other yoyos which I own. I would like to conclude this post with one quotation on the mistake:- “Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something”. Thank you for reading my post.

[Theolodger]

Good post! Oops, I shouldn’t say that…, I’m a contestant!!!

[Theolodger]

[hobbygod (Dressel Designs)]

This is my first metal yoyo. A yoyofactory hectic. It’ll be 10 years this upcoming April since I bought it, and to this day I still throw it fairly often. It’s a pocket sized yoyo too, and because it’s so beat I don’t mind bringing it to other places. It’s been sanded a bit, stripped twice, has silly putty in the bearing seat/response area (12 year old me didn’t play games when it came to snappy binds😂) and many half swaps with most other yoyos that came into my hands at the time. It brings back a lot of memories. I remember I had to wash all of my family member’s cars to get it, since a 60 dollar price tag was expensive to a 12 year old. Something I’ll always take with me and never let go of.

Another picture where you can see the forum better for my above entry.

[vegabomb (LJ)]

I like this story.

[anon19434144]

Mistake after mistake after mistake leads to less mistakes which eventually leads to more successes than mistakes.

[anon19434144]

After seeing all these posts I am led to think of my dings as badges and not horrible things to see.

[codinghorror]

that’s the goal!!

[hobbygod (Dressel Designs)]

I even got a video of me still on YouTube still using the hectic. It’s very bad with no talking, but it’s a cool then and now type thing to watch.

I'm Hectic for the yyf Hectic

[shatterFX (Tyler)]

Same here. When I got my first bad one I thought I potentially ruined my yoyo, but turns out the main thing that gets affected is the resell value

[codinghorror]

I once beat the snot out of a metal yoyo with a hammer and cement … and I was quite shocked how much abuse a metal yoyo can take and still be perfectly smooth.

(The BIG exception, however, is damage to the axle area. Once you get damage there, you’re pretty hosed.)

[shatterFX (Tyler)]

Yeah that’s mostly what I was finding too in my quest for information regarding yoyo dings- for the most part, harmless, but a bent axle would be really bad

[hobbygod (Dressel Designs)]

This is true. The hectic that I posted has the axle glued in. If I had it in the other side it doesn’t screw together. Half.of it is stripped and it’s like the third axle I bought for it.

A bassalope I had back then too has been stripped for most of it’s life too, but I recently got it cut for SPRs this summer and it plays like a dream now.

[yoyo_girl_700 (Priyanka)]

I was in Greensboro NC. I’ve actually been there twice… 2016,2017. I absolutely love the state. It’s gorgeoussss.

[yomega_fan_335 (The Yo mast3r)]

Final post, hopefully not too late. Here’s my old Yomega Glide:

This was my first unresponsive metal yoyo, back when I fanboyed and idolised Yomega. I bought it from the first run, for a whopping $90! Keep in mind that you can obtain a YYF Genesis back then for only $85. Owing to my young age and relative inexperience, it got beat up, a lot. Once I lost interest in throwing for a while, I abandoned my Glide, leaving it to rot in my house. Once I decided to pick up throwing again, I found my Glide again, the Konkave bearing in the original working as good as new. Eventually, I received better throws (CODE 2, Czech Point, Topdeck etc…) and the Glide got used less and less. I still throw it occasionally, it gives me some nostalgia, and I would like to mod my Glide into a Bimetal in the future.

[Theolodger]

Congrats on the new tongue twister!

[MegaNickels]

This reminds me of when my niece was 6 years old. She stole my Augie fash G5+. She was a bit of a kleptomaniac. She stole my Pokemon crystal version too . Now I looooooved that yoyo at the time. I remember not being able to find it one day and desperately searching for it for 2 months. One day I went over to my sisters house because she lived near by. I found my yoyo AND my Pokemon crystal version in her junk drawer! What was really funny though is that my g5 didn’t have scratch on it when I found it

[codinghorror]

Huh well… I hope she grew out of her 6 year old kleptomania!!

[Yoyosampler]

So, I have several “beat” yoyos, some may be more beat than my entry. For instance, I have a YYJ Dark Magic that has more cracks in its body than Darth Sion from Star Wars KOTOR 2 (Bonus points if you know who I’m talking about) and I have an old Henry’s Cobra that is getting pretty shredded from my trying to learn 4A, but the DM was cracked when I got it, and the Cobra was rough when I got it too. I wanted to use a yoyo that owes its scars only to me!

I’m sharing this more for everyone’s entertainment than for the prize, but if it’s worthy for consideration, great! For my entry, I present for your consideration, my Turbo Bumble Bee GT, purchased in 1999 at a local hobby shop. What I really wanted was a Custom Products Chain Reactor, so I didn’t really like this yoyo at first, found the colors annoying. I ended up settling for it, though, because the shop owner told me this was the best plastic yoyo on the market and that the Chain Reactor could break bone if it snaps back too hard. Having tried a Reactor as an adult, I believe it! That little son-of-a-gun has teeth!

Anyway, on to the damage (a little tough to show with half of it being black): I’ve always had OCD about the condition of my belongings, especially my yoyos, so this is pretty beat up for me! The first time this thing kissed pavement, as I recall, I was on vacation in the place where I got started yoyo-ing in the first place a couple years before (A pretty little gated town on Lake Erie called Lakeside, 100 year old cottages, quiet streets, best pizza and ice cream I’ve ever had, but I digress)! I bought a Klutz yoyo book and yoyo in a local book store and started playing. 2 years, a few yomegas, and 1 Playmaxx Bumblebee GT later, I was practicing in the street, and it suddenly smacked pavement directly on a throw. I was very upset, for this yoyo had grown on me a lot since I got it! My first thought was to get another one as a “replacement” for my now semi-ruined yoyo (it wasn’t ruined, obviously, but it’s how I saw it as an 11-year-old). It has, as you can see, had a few more close encounters with hard surfaces since that fateful day, in part because I never bothered to adjust the string length to my height (still don’t, usually). It has also made a few breaks for freedom when my strings broke, fortunately never hitting anything breakable.

Somehow, the caps got messed up, probably from being in my pocket so much.

However, although I have OCD about the condition of my belongings, I also tend use things until they are literally falling apart… even the string, yikes!

(Yeah, that dull nasty looking thing in front is the most recent string from my Bee and the wad of strings behind it are new strings from the same batch; think it’s time for a replacement? Nah! It’s got a few more throws left in it!). The bearing is the original that came with it, and I think I’ve only changed one of the friction pads on it one time in the 20 years I’ve owned it (so yeah, it’s not very tug responsive anymore).

I took a break for a few years in the 2000s, and when I picked up yoyos again around 2010, it was only slightly tug responsive. Did I change the pads again? Psssh, no! I used its unresponsiveness to help me learn to bind until I got my Dark Magic 2 in the mail from YoyoExpert! Nowadays, I still use it as a looper with a dab of YYJ thick lube…

and I still haven’t replaced the other pad…

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my story; thanks for reading!

[anon19434144]

Great story. Well written. All of these contest stories would make a great little book!