Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage done to your yoyos by following this guide. This is based on my personal experience and is intended for educational purposes only. Should you follow this guide please be careful and use common sense.
Warning: This method is irreversible.
How it works: Re-aligning yoyo halves to reduce as much vibe as possible.
It may not seem like it but vibe usually has something to do with yoyo halves not aligned perfectly. It can be because of high pressure between the soft aluminum vs steel bearing further causing warp or wear on the bearing seat, or slight machining imperfections. However it must be noted that with loose bearing post or simply bad machining you can’t expect it to be totally smooth with this method.
Note: To avoid misunderstanding, as I know bearing seat is the small raised part on the yoyo half that got pressed by the bearing, and bearing post is the part that is really tight on some yoyos making it hard to remove. Seat is where the bearing sits, and post is the part that is “hugged” by the bearing.
What you need:
Vibey metal or plastic yoyos that have bearing seat.
Sharp small screwdriver, or something similar that can be used to scrape aluminum/plastic but strong enough not to break easily.
Board marker, pencil, chalk, or anything that can be used to write marks on the yoyo (depending of the color of the yoyo), it should be easily cleanable.
Tissue to clean up dust.
Tuning:
Throw the yoyo down, use your nail to reduce the “throw vibe” as much as possible.
Now, pay attention to the marks, if it has longer curves, that means this half is more aligned (which means better) than the one with shorter curves. Shorter curves means worse half.
More explanation to this, when the yoyo halves are misaligned it is barely noticeable for human eyes, that is why we need something to determine where the halves are bent, by using markers. These marks is exactly where the yoyo halves “get the closest to each other”, which means we need to remove some materials on the opposite side to straighten it up.
This is the riskiest part, carefully scrape the bearing seat on the opposite side of the marks using a sharp screwdriver, leaving about 90 degrees of the unscraped part that is facing the marks. Depending on how bad the half is, you may want to scrape a little deeper (be careful do it a little at a time). If the bearing post is really tight you may want to scrape or sand the bearing post a bit on the same side of the marks.
Note: You will only need to scrape on the part that is touching the bearing. https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/t1.0-9/10256422_10201816782255211_1174842153770884133_n.jpg
Clean the dust thoroughly, test, repeat if necessary. Do not aim for “truer curves”, just get it smoother to an acceptable level (unless of course if you are more obsessed than me).
That’s all there is to it.
this strikes me as a truly horrible idea that could end very, very badly.
There are -so- many reasons vibe happens… this randomly takes a guess at one of them, and then even more randomly tries to “fix” it by intentionally damaging a yo-yo in a totally random and uncontrolled way.
Agree. Usually the error that causes vibe can be measured in .0001" (ten thousands of an inch) and there is no way you can accurately scrape that size (you can’t see it).
I have fixed at least 5 yoyos with this method, no problem at all. I can see how this will scare most people though, but it’s not all that scary until you tried it… at least it isn’t for me. It may seem that you will easily carve a really deep groove on the bearing seat, but no, scraping only removes very little (and as I mentioned do it a little at a time) and once it got pressure from the bearing it somewhat flatten itself out. I mean you don’t take a big chunk of aluminum altogether but just make it rough and then reassembling the yoyo will flatten the surface. There is practically no reduction in gap width (as far as playability concerned).
I have actually fixed a wobble diffusion (plastic) that I deeply carved because it wobble like crazy, pretty sure that the halves are not exactly “bent” anymore but rather “off” center (because the marks are not in the same direction) but I still managed to fix it with this method.
The safest way if you wanna do this is, only do it if the marks are on the same side, and only scrape a little at a time.
The whole thing only take me like less than 10 minutes or so. Personally I will even do it for other people for a price, and will take responsibility if anything goes wrong (only doing it locally though). That is how safe it is for me, hence the reason I’m putting up this guide. Been tinkering and somewhat obsessed with tuning vibe, this is so far the only surest way to fix the problem.
However if you are super worried, simply putting small tape on the opposite side of the marks will also fix little vibe.
I don’t care enough about vibe to worry about this, but I’m still curious about the technique. As such, I’m failing to understand the part where you create the marks. A video of the technique and the results would be helpful!
What he’s doing is basically removing material from one side of the shim of the bearing seat, which allows the bearing to sit better. Think about it like this, before, the bearing was sitting at a slant because one side of the shim is thicker or taller than the other, he shaved down the thicker side, which lets the bearing sit flat on the shim. While the logic does work in tuning the yoyo, most of the time, you will not be able to tell if this is the issue, and I would not recommend doing so. If you do intend on going through with something as risky as this, use it as a last resort only.
I get what he’s doing, I just don’t know how to make the marks to determine which side to shave. Not that I’m shaving any. Might try the tape, though.
Basically let the yoyo spun, touch it with your nail to reduce the vibe to minimum, then take the pencil (or whatever you used to mark), touch the tip of the pencil on the yoyo’s “string catching side” (see picture above) it will create curved marks.
Even if the yoyo doesn’t actually bent but rather badly machined that it has uneven weight, this will still fix the problem by actually bending the yoyo halves a little, not enough for it to vibe in the other way but enough to reduce the previous vibe to a minimum.
One thing to note that even if the halves are visibly bent a bit, chances are you will hardly be able to tell when it spun, as long as you don’t feel the vibe. Old plastics that doesn’t have seat like Fireball or modded Raider for looping sometimes got bent real bad because of overtightening/modding, but when it spun I personally can’t see it “ghosting” or vibing at all.
The key is to go a little at a time, and don’t overdo it.
