My uncle owns a dental lab and they have some sort of blasting apparatus that is used to blast away the stone molds after pouring up a gold tooth. I asked him if it could be used to put a texture on an alluminum yoyo. He said yes but I wasn’t sure if the blasting media would be too coarse, I think that the media is silica (sand?) And I know that it leaves the gold with a slightly matte finish because the tooth still needs to be polished afterwards. If any more information is needed please feel free to ask.
Sounds like a sandblaster. You probably won’t like it on a metal. If it’s on a plastic, it’s fine, because it wears away over time and actually feels soft.
I found that the media was actually aluminum oxide powder with 50 micron sized particles. That’s the exact opposite of too coarse. I decided to bite the bullet and just do it on a scrap yoyo half. It came out pretty good I’ll post pics later.
EDIT: heres some pics, its half of a bassboost
http://i1080.photobucket.com/albums/j330/sirnaq_MN42/IMAG0333.jpg
http://i1080.photobucket.com/albums/j330/sirnaq_MN42/IMAG0335.jpg
How’s it feel? How does it seem like it would grind?
It feels kinda like like it was dusted with graphite powder. I think it would grind very well. I might strip a yoyo and do the whole thing to see how it grinds, or if someone wants to let me blast their raw yoyo I would do it for free as a tester. I would probably do only a few testers like 5ish.
That looks amazing. Unfortunately I don’t have a raw yoyo though…Maybe I could strip the anno on my t5 or something, haha.
Looks pretty darn good. Make sure you clean it good. Blasting has a tendency of driving the dirt into the new surface.
I think that what the powdery feel was, after a bunch of handling it feels more like a chalkboard finish. I’m not sure if thats good our bad, I’ve never had a yoyo that felt like this.
Tell us. How does she grind?
Wow, that looks really rough. Is it possible that it might graze your skin?
That’s not rough at all. It actually looks like the perfect media to use.
I wonder how that looks spinning under the sun. It looks a bit “angular”. It looks like it would deflect a fair amount of light. Should be cool!
Looks a bit harsh now, but after some wear and tear I think it would be really nice. Granted, all my assumptions can only be made by eye.