Hey. I’ve never dinged a yoyo so hard to make it vibe at all, but most people say that it is due to a bit of aluminium/plastic being removed when a yoyo dings. I think that is not true in most cases. Doesnt it have to do with the axle instead of the body? What makes me think about that is when I used to spin tops I would beat the crap out of them and they would still be exactly as smooth as they were(and a top usually falls to the floor more than a yoyo does).
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Smacking a yo can cause vibe, but as you suspect it’s not from removal of material but from a resulting misalignment.
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I’ve dinged about 300 yoyos or so, and only 5 or 6 have developed vibe because of making contact with the ground.
It’s rare, but it definitely happens
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Yeah but what I mean is that usually what makes them vibe is usually the axle, not the material removal(which is minimal)
More common than either of those for me has been bearing seat damage. All it takes is a slight warping or the bearing seat to cause vibe.
Material removal has never caused vibe for me
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Any vibe is 100% due to damage around the bearing seat and axle. Damage to the rims does not matter one bit. Source: I beat the crap out of a magicyoyo n12 with a hammer to prove this.
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I was not brave enough to destroy a bimetal but send me one and I can “test” it for you 
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I can send you a Kodiak I yeeted into some concrete if you want to do some testing. It was smooth AF before it was yought.
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I think it’s a bit of both. If material is removed, then it will probably be a cause of vibe. That’s why yoyos are machined so precisely.
However, I bet misalignment is a more common cause of vibe, and is also a factor in why tuning beat up yoyos can make them vibe less.
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You have to remove a TON of material for this to be the case though.
I think materials with more irregular density may be more prone to that type of vibe, which basically means only wood and perhaps a handful of poorly made plastics.
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Dropping a yoyo on concrete is usually enough to remove a visible chunk of material.
Rim misalignment on bimetals is also a factor.
I mean like multiple grams of metal. Like… a LOT. We beat the LIVING SNOT out of that magicyoyo n12 with a hammer and it did nothing at all to add vibe, other than make it painful to catch because of all the cuts in the metal.
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When using a hammer, are you really losing much material? I would think it’s just kind of rearranging it with dents and knicks. I think you need test round two using a file or your trusty dremel to remove some material all together.
Right that’s my point, you can “ding” to the extreme, like 20+ super hard throws into concrete, and it basically does nothing at all to the weight distribution of the yoyo.
The axle and bearing seat on the other hand… are critical.
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Not even the slightest bit of fingernail vibe?
Not really, no… I was quite surprised. Beating the heck out of the rim, detached from the yo-yo, does effectively nothing.
I guess that kind of makes sense
Sort of. If you believed, like I did, that very minor weight differences or shape differences in each half of the yo-yo could cause vibe… then this experiment would have proven that.
It did not.
Clearly even major differences in weight and shape don’t matter much at all for vibe… you can test this yourself, take the two most different shaped / weight yo-yos you own, screw them apart, then create a Frankenstein Monster yo-yo with two radically different weight and size halves. Throw it and see what happens.
It will be glassy smooth, zero vibe.
(I still believe major density differences in the material can cause vibe, but you can only get that with wood or bad plastics.)
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When you Ding it just a bit of material ia removed. A yoyo is 65g. The ding is not big enough to make a yoyo vibe itself. Even if there are a lot
Well. Every ding will cause a very bit of vibe. But it is unoticiable for us even for the fingernail test. The vibe we are talking about is due to damages in axle/bearing seat as you said.