it would be cool if you made a mold that you poured water into and the froze it into a ice yoyo and used side effects for the bearing seat. only problem is vibe.
I spent some time in the machine shop machining the aluminum bar I had into yoyo parts. I think the results are promising. Still a ways to go before I can test it, and that will be the real test. But overall I am happy and still learning things I can do to make them better. Remember this is just the first one, it is bound to be the worst. lol
Machining tool longer than I expected. I turned some of the speeds down for the aluminum to be conservative. Once I get the first one done, I can start speeding things up until I find the sweet spot. Here are some pictures.
This is the fixture I will use to hold the hub when I machine the back. It also looks similar to how the back of the hub will look, so you can get an idea for what that will look like. This part is straight off the machine and you can see the tools marks. They are about 0.002", but you can still see them. I tumbled the hub for about 2 hours while I worked on the fixture, so you can see how that took off some of the tool marks. I am hoping that tumbling them can remove all the tool marks. We will see. http://www.joshupdyke.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IMG_0605.jpg
If you ever want a different way to hold the yo-yo while machining it, what you can do is first bore out the inner cup of the yo-yo and machine the rim. Then flip it around and machine the bearing seat and the rest of the body. Although on a 3-axis mill like what it looks like you are using, it would be really tricky to machine the rims to angle toward the catch zone without a horizontally mounted rotary table.
I scanned through your website and blog and it appears that we are not that far away from one another. This could make things interesting.
I spent some more time at the shop machining yoyos. I am close to having my first finished yoyo. It turns out that there is a lot of work that goes into making a single yoyo. I machined the first hub and it turned out pretty good. The hardest part is to flip the yoyo over and find the center very accurately. By accurate I mean within one thousandth of an inch, (0.001"). That is not an easy thing to do. I think the first hub was within a couple thousands of being perfect. If you look at the rim you can see a tiny edge, maybe 0.002 thousands of an inch. I have a couple ideas of how to change my machining to make it a little easier center this even better.
The second hub was not so good. It was getting late, I was tired and hungry. All things that lead to bad things happening. I centered the second hub and started machining it. I am not sure why but the part came out of the vice and got tossed around. I looked it over and it seemed like I could save it. So I put it back together and centered it again. Then tried to skip ahead in the code to pick up where I left off. The machine has to do a preparatory move to get to where it needs to be to start in the middle of the code. I looked very closely at where it wanted to go to and thought it would move in a straight line there and I thought it would be find.
I WAS WRONG!
The way it actually moves, it to go to a safe z height, then move to the x and y position, and then move the z to the final location. The safe z was defined at zero, which would be fine if you programmed that to be the top of your part. But since I flipped it over, my zero was the bottom of my part. So the machine crashed the tool into my yoyo, destroying about 3 hours of work.
I stopped the machined and ended up trying to save it. I thought it might be possible, but after finishing the machining It turns out the rim has a big cut taken out. But I learned a lot and now I know how to jump into the middle of my code.
I tried putting the yoyo together and seeing what it looked like. I am pretty happy with it. I also tried throwing it, but the vib was insane. So just out of curiosity I put the good hub together with one of my dark magic hubs. It actually was pretty good. Still a little vibration, but since it was two halves of two different yoyos it doesnāt mean too much. I weighed them and they are only 1 gram different.
I also laser etched the yoyo I powder coated. I think it turned out pretty good. I am putting silicone in both the powder coated yoyo and also the machined one. Just to test them out. I tried going back to the shop today to machine a new hub, but the machine was busy all day. So I will have to wait a few more days.
The way you proceed with your goals and share your steps and results is really something nice to read. Please keep documenting what you do even when youāre super good at it. Clearly this is the best thread of the month.
Iāve seen a few documentary videos on how the high end yoyos are made and most use a spinning lathe machine, where the aluminum bar spins, instead of being stationary and just the tool moving. From the little I read, they have a much higher precision as the bar is spinning just like the yoyo will, so itās very hard to go asymmetric. Do you think these machines will be needed, and will you have access to these tools once you move forward?
When you mean a lot of time, how much time is that? An hour? Couple hours? Whole day? How much of your bar did you end up using for that prototype? And do you use the machines for free, or is your new hobby of making yoyos extremely expensive?