Black Friday sales rolled around and I got one of the Yoyostudio titanium TC4-7 yoyos, because it was on sale at the time and I’d been curious about how a ti yoyo would play. I also have a titanium anodizing kit and I’ve been playing with anodizing stuff, so figured I’d give it a try with a yoyo, and it came out pretty well:
This is a fairly simple technique; power supply to control the voltage (=colour), clip one wire to the yoyo, I tore off a little bit of loofah(natural sponge) and soaked it in baking soda water, clipped that to the other wire, touch it to the yoyo and voila, colours change where it touches and power goes through, so changing to different voltages gets me these colours, and because it’s a bit of sponge I get these uneven shapes. (You can apparently also do this without a PSU by stacking 9V batteries together, google ‘diy titanium anodizing’, I just had the kit already). The more usual dip-in-water technique takes more control to get even colour transitions, so I went with a more random finish that’s more forgiving, and I’m pretty happy with the result.
(as for the yoyo side of things, how does it play? just fine – for a cheapish monometal it’s 100% okay. I’m not particularly good at yoyoing so I can’t comment on how it does, say, horizontal stuff, or high-end tech or whatever, because I can’t do that with any yoyo, but compared to other things it’s not slow/heavy feeling, it’s not light/insubstantial, it doesn’t bind too much or too little, the bearing’s good, the size is okay, the shape is okay, it doesn’t go off-axis on its own, it’s ‘neutral’, I guess? Almost uninterestingly so, but also that’s great for me because it just does what I tell it to do, so it helps for learning things. I guess it has very minor fingernail vibe, but nothing visible)
(edit: removing prices/store names, this is the yoyoexpert forums so it doesn’t seem cool to mention other places)
