I enjoy yoyos from $6 to $90 (so far) and now I’m totally going to buy another Surge (esp. since I had to give it to my wife).
It’s color made my mouth water but it had this vibe that was just too much. And so it sat.
After putting on decent glasses and taking out the bearing I saw – a giant injection dimple or something on both bearing seats!
When I filed those dimples off and made sure the seats were generally much smoother, put the bearing back in more level, suddenly 98% of the vibe is gone and it’s a great little organic for flinging around and hitting myself with. I like to have the different shapes, as alternating keeps me from getting lazy in technique another shape is more forgiving of.
I put a narrow C in it for my wife and now it’s a fantastic responsive that’s more powerful that, say, a whip for like one dollar difference right now (with the mega Surge sale).
The bearing sits a little inside the yoyo for the Surge, so going narrow-c did require me to twist her up a string that’s a little skinnier than my norms (a 6 round-trip thread before folding, instead of my standard 7). With that it now sleeps forever and yet comes back with a very ideally calibrated tug, perfect for brain twister, around the corner etc.
I love the Surge. I don’t think I ever had the problem you mentioned with any of mine, though. It’s one of those yoyos that I always recommend on here for anyone that is looking for a good performing cheap throw or a little something to bump your purchase to the $50 mark so that you can get free shipping, and at $8 or so, it’s barely more expensive than the bearing that it comes with. I miss YYJ.
It’s the only one I tried, but the tough little spikey pimple burr was actually on both bearing seats right next to the date stamp (funny place to put a date stamp but the numbers are recessed so as not to make the surface unlevel), maybe just a guy sleeping at the switch passing that one. Just needed a 3 minute deburring with a file and voila… or else no shielded bearing would have sit flatly at all, and an unshielded may have sat flat but the burrs would have stick right up into the path of the balls, hehe. Perfect for me to get it , years in QC and deburring even after making it to machines hehe. We love it now and will buy one or two more. Just 27 left forever.
I found those little plastic barbs on the hub, but now that I think of it, I think I’ve found one around the bearing seat once too. Seems like it happened every now and then with their celcon yoyos, but it was always pretty easy to fix. YoyoJam definitely had its production flaws, but I’ve always been pleased with them.
Yeah I think it’s terribly unfortunate about YYJ 
I’ve been throwing a Trigger into every purchase, hehe.
I saw a video just yesterday and it looked like they were machining parts and assembling Dark Magics right here in the US…? I had no idea until seeing that and then going to the Wiki and seeing it was the pet project of Dale Bell and closed when he suffered health problems. Here’s a video Machines How They Work from the Science Channel that offers how the Dark Magic and modern yoyos “can spin faster than a formula one engine”
Can they? Look at the actual data, e.g.
Oh wow cool test, I just read it, neat CodingHorror!!
Cool you tested!
Someone has failed to return my chronometer I used to test my homemade bows and arrows and I’m suspecting they may have shot it with a bullet and aren’t telling me
Not that I can throw a 6.30 minute sleeper anyway like people commonly throw when challenged, and so my initial RPM would be just as inferior probably. Unless I threw an extra hard, spastic wobbler and tested the first 2 seconds, lol…
Excellent! I like the Trigger too. I don’t know how deep you are into YoyoJam’s line, so forgive me if this is old news. You might like the Big Ben too if you haven’t tried it. It’s one of my favorite plastics. It has hung in there in the YYJ line from around 2003 and is still a fun throw.
Thanks… no, I don’t have one but it appears there are still some around. I’ll add one. I spaced out talking to my wife and when I ordered my second Topyo Photon today (I like my one so much I want to have a spare rather than worry playing it, it’s rather unique to me) and added a Surge (since I gave mine to Tina)… in my A.D.D. hit “pay” before realizing I was at $45 and so it would have only cost me a couple bucks for another NOS YYJ to hit $50 and get free shipping 
Oh well, I know I’ll buy something else very soon.
That’s one nice thing about YYE is they ship so fast. Before I thought about it my order was surely out the door already, from past experience, hehe
Hmm, I may have to try a Photon. I’ve been curious about it since it came out. I think you’ll like the Big Ben. It’s got a little of the plastic YYJ vibe, but it has spin times and stability that is not unlike a lot of their hybrid models. I’m sure the translucent yellow version they have in the YYE store would look awesome under blacklight too, although I haven’t tried it with mine yet.
I’d like to try a YYJ SpinFaktor, too… and as viral and sold out as the Dark Magic II was, there the relatively similar-looking Cerberus sits, just with bigger rims (?)… the only reason I hadn’t bought a Cerberus yet was I worried about knocking the rim on something. I like the lower inner wall of the SpinFaktor, and what a piece of history it is. Hard to believe there are any left being historic and lower wall than some.
Re: the TopYo Photon – if you get one realize it may not have the “floatiness”, or horizonal savvy as some yoyos (not that I’m experienced enough to aptly compare…going by 3rd party word plus my own). But for $34 it really has that bi-metal feel with the lighter-than-6061 7003 in the middle and the and denser-than-6061 7075 rims… Its undersized diameter feels amazing in the hand and it goes better in my pocket. My wife immediately noticed it felt tantalizingly “cold” in the hand with the heat conduction of the fat little rims. And some are mixing “floaty” with “stable” in the same score… which isn’t fair to the Photon because it may not be what I thought was floaty biut what what I understand stable to be is that a stable throw doesn’t tend to tilt or tip or veer off its axis… and in that definition of stable the Photon is much more stable than most of my yoyos. I can finish more tricks all on one axis (without it tilting and rubbing the string) than most of my throws with the Photon, so it makes me feel bad people give it a 2.5 on “floaty/stable” when it’s so very stable to me. It has positively zero vibe like a $100+ throw. Smooth out my own thrown-in wobble with my fingernail and it has zero, zero vibe. Like it’s standing still, even when it’s slowing down and a vibe would present itself. I just didn’t want you to grab one with my talking it up without knowing its limitations, but I think that’s most undersized throws, right?
Back relatively more on-topic with YYJ - do you have a SpinFaktor or Cerberus?
I appreciate you giving me a little information about the Photon. I’ve been considering both the Photon and the G5 re-release. I like undersized throws too as long as they have enough rim weight. I got a YYF G-Funk, but I had to keep a center track bearing in it or it would tend to wander off plane because it had very little rim weight. It’s light and floaty, but not very forgiving of an off-center throw.
Yes, I have both and I really like them. I understand your reservations about the rims on the Cerberus, but they’re pretty durable. I don’t think you’d need to worry about that. I’ve got a couple YYJs with some fairly substantial dings on the metal rims and they don’t affect play unless someone were to really heave it into the pavement like Hulk on Loki if you catch my meaning. I was starting to give you an in-depth review of them, but I thought it might be better to answer your specific questions about them rather than writing you “War and Peace.” What would you like to know about the SpinFaktor and Cerberus, or do you want the critical analysis of them?
yoyosampler thanks, no hehe I often cast upon people ye Walle of Texte all too readily typing swiftly with a coffee fueled stream of consciousness. I Think I’d like the Cerberus then… it looks fun… I’d been getting a little away from the higher inner walls after getting a couple, though, and noticed the SpinFaktor has a lower one like it was turning into a newer model (even though I think it came out before the Cerberus? Wasn’t the SpinFaktor like the revolutionary plastic/metal original?)…
Ultimately I should probably just try them. Thanks! Good to know you enjoy them.
The spinfaktor actually has had a few iterations…
No problem, lol! Talk is cheap, haha, so instead of sitting through the Great Wall of Text about Cerberus, you can get one. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. To be fair, the only complaint I’ve heard, which isn’t a specific complaint about Cerberus, but about later YYJ models in general, is that when they added the solid spin axle system, some people thought that all of YYJ’s models started behaving alike.
Yes, the original SpinFaktor was that original ground breaking throw and came out long before Cerberus (1998 or 99), and as jhb8426 said, several iterations have been made since (and yoyomuseum.com doesn’t have a complete list). If you can find one, you’ll find that the bearing is too narrow to go completely unresponsive without a shim placed behind the bearing. When playing it stock it’s more of a “semi-responsive” to responsive yoyo. The SpinFaktor X (SFX) is available at YYE, but that’s the last generation of the SpinFaktor.
Actually, the spinfaktor, like most YYJ yoyos, came with a standard “C” bearing (like most yoyos today) and an adjustable gap feature. No shims were required, but could be used if you felt them as necessary. You could make the gap wider or narrower as you desired, thus unresponsive or responsive, by simply tightening or untightening the yoyo. The adjustable gap feature was standard on all YYJ models before the solid spin axle system was introduced.
I agree that particular “feature” should be in scare quotes 
I mean no disrespect, and I don’t mean to start a debate here, but I think you might be thinking of a different model. As you pointed out earlier, there have been many SpinFaktors over the years, and you’re correct that YYJs before the solid spin axle had adjustable gaps. However, I have 2 original SpinFaktors from around '99, a Capurro Faktor, which was basically just a pink Spinfaktor without the o-ring, and I have a Mega SpinFaktor. All of them use the same small YYJ bearing that is around the same size as the bearings in the Sunset Trajectory and the Unleashed loopers, though I haven’t done the direct size comparison on those lately, they might be the same size.
I modded one of my SpinFaktors to play unresponsive by putting in a shim. Unscrewing the halves far enough to go unresponsive allowed the string to slip off the bearing and go down into the axle without a shim to expose more of the bearing. The inner diameter of the bearing is the same as that of a C bearing, so YYJ shims fit, but it’s outer diameter is much smaller.
Sounds good. I wasn’t aware that they initially came with a smaller bearing at one time. That was probably the bearing that came with the Matrix.
Yes, I think you’re right about the Matrixx. I recently looked some of this up out of curiosity, and I think that the Matrixx was a 2001 release if I’m remembering right. The earliest model from YYJ that I know of that had a full C sized bearing was the Phat Phaktor from 2002. I think the Patriot came out around that time too. There may have been another from 2001, but those are the earliest ones I know of from my collection.
I’ve always been kind of out of the loop on what was popular in yoyoing until very recently, so I can only speculate from looking at my yoyo collection or look up info about the state of the hobby at that time. I could easily be mistaken about this, but if the arrival of the large C size bearing was around 2002 or 2003, is it accurate to say that that’s when unresponsive play/1A as we know it today came along? Or, were people finding ways to get to 100% unresponsive play in 1999 and 2000? I’m just curious; I’m not trying to put anyone on the spot, haha.