Seems like people have been printing yoyos a bit more lately with people staying inside due to Covid and such. Andre reached out to help revive an old project I had - and I thought this was a great opportunity to get this spacer kit available at YoyoExpert. Half of them already sold so i sent Andre a new batch.
This kit I developed essentially eliminates all the difficulties and frustrations of 3d printing a yoyo, and lets the user focus on the fun - designing and printing their own yoyo, not fiddling around with getting a bearing seat to work. Plus side is you only need to buy one kit and you can swap them with as many yoyos as you want.
I released these designs free to use, you can use the above measurements to build your own hub and make your own design. Even sell the yoyos you print, I don’t care hah. This is also a good tool to help prototype yoyos you might plan to have machined for your own company, especially to see if the profile feels ok in-hand before sending it off for prototyping - kind of a very cheap pre-proto stage.
Another funny thing is that 5 years back when I was printing a lot, the cheapest printers were around 700$. Now i am seeing some for under 200$ - you could buy a few spacer kits AND a 3d printer, for the price of a modern Bi-metal or Titanium. That I find really exciting and helps more people get into it.
New Design for 2021
I worked on this on and off last few months between Luftverk stuff, here is a new design that I finally got done. Its pretty hard to print but if you have your machine dialed it should do it no problem, with no support. Its cool to hear the wind it creates with all the little pockets. Its in the download link so take a crack at printing it!
I have a question for you: how do you print your yoyo cups without supports? I use a resin printer and I can’t get good prints with perfectly smooth (and consistent) surfaces, even with supports (in fact, supports just tend to make matters worse).
FDM printers can easily print angles up to 45-55 degree. So you do not need any supports at all for the cup normally. If you want a spherical cup it can become more tricky. look at the cup design precisely and also on the outer ring. All ~45 degree angles. If you need supports for the nut hole you can make supports just for this tiny spot if you have a slicer that supports it.
This. This is fantastic. I started 3d printing last May and have made a few decent yoyos, but I’ve had to use old A size spacers from my Duncan metal drifter. This should prove to be much easier!
I got a few question about that, its not but I tried it on my buzzon element x and it actually scews together. its slightly smaller so if you wanted to get it perfect you could 3d print a ring around it.
The seat is actually 1.6 I believe but its a nice idea to have it protrude a hair so the 3d printed surface doesnt catch on the string. Again these are rough estimates and optimized to my preferences. Anyone could easily make more changes to these and upload their own!
So out of curiosity I put a Center Trac bearing into the two halves of the kit and measured the gap with my digital calipers: 4.15mm. That’s really tight. Was that really the target gap width?
I haven’t used this kit in a 3D printed yoyo yet, but how do you install yours? Do you just press fit it in or do you glue it in? The bearing was so tight in the bearing seat that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get it out again. I imagine that the whole kit would just pop out of any prototype yoyo when merely trying to remove the bearing.
I started using 4.2 in all Luftverk yoyos again as well. The binds are much much tighter and I found wider ones like 4.4 and higher are just comically wide and cause the string to slip near the end. I dont know where this obsession with gap width came from. Id rather get a tighter bind, a harder throw and less kickback, just feels so much better to me, but of course that is an opinion and everyone has their own preference.
The spacer has just presses in. The bearing shouldn’t be that tight, unless the bearing you are using is galled up from being installed and uninstalled multiple times in other yoyos which would change the tolerence. All my centertrac bearings fit really loose in the bearing seats, most just take a wiggle to come out, but they are usually brand new bearings that I install.
By all means if you want to glue it down go ahead but I tend to pop mine out to use with other shapes!
I tend to like narrower gaps too, and I’ve found 4.4mm to be the sweet spot for me. I don’t put a lot of string wraps into the gap so I don’t need a really wide gap, and I too prefer more spin off the throw and snappier binds.
The Center Trac bearing I tried was basically new and unused and it was quite difficult to get into the bearing seat, and consequently difficult to get out again. Maybe I should try a different bearing.
So I have been working on this project again to try and revitalize it a bit. The spacers flew off the shelf for a while but seems like they slowed down. Not sure if this was because of summer or if people were getting frustrated with the printing but I haven’t heard much.
I made a bunch of new designs but ran into a huge problem. I realized that there are so many variables in printing, that if I dimensioned the spacer seat for the spacer to snap in, it might be too loose or too tight for someone else depending on things like printer type, filament and machine setup. Since I really wanted this to be a print-and-go kind of kit, this was frustrating. Especially if this is someone’s first introduction to printing, they might wrongfully blame the file, or the printer, or themselves.
I talked to a few people who print as well and the only solution I could think of was to do a quick calibration test with various seat sizes from 20.10, 20.20, 20.30 and 20.40. The spacer is 20.08 in diameter - and yes, at times, 20.40 was what my printer would need to make it work well. So my idea is to set up a file where you can quickly print just the 4 spacer seat sizes with the same settings you would use to print the yoyo. This calibration would hopefully help? I will try and test this idea this week - but I do feel a bit burnt out from trying to figure this out. In a perfect world it would just print and work.
Anyway heres a sneak peek for my newest design, no support next to the Acadius for comparison:
Im going to maybe set up the 4 test prints then maybe make a Youtube video explaining that procedure so its more clear for beginners. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know Im all ears! Pulling my hair out trying to figure out a system that can make this work for everyone! Ill post the files shortly once they are more dialed.
If you have purchased a kit, please let me know your experience with it as well - that would be really helpful. Even if you struggled with it, hated it, vibed ect. The more info I know the better I can design around those issues. I am debating on running more spacers for Yoyoexpert and trying to grow this as a niche community like modding was back in the day, and seeing if there is enough interest!
im sorry for sending this in a dead thread but i just found this while trying to design my own 3d yoyo and had a question that i didnt know where to ask if you dont mind helping,
i downloaded your yoyo designs to try and make a mold for the spacer that i could use on my own design, however i realized after checking the sizes that your stuff is huge, like the small hole in the middle for the axle is 4.3 cm in diameter and the yoyo diameter itself being almost 60 cm when my whole design was about 5.5cm in diameter, could it be that i did something wrong or does this stuff need to be scaled down? and if so by how much?
