How Fast Does a Yo-Yo Spin?

The science of yoyos has always intrigued me. I’m just wondering how fast does a yoyo spin (not including the type of yoyo, or bearing used, or how worn the response is) on average

Over 9000
Rpm
Depends of course on the throw itself.

Thanks :slight_smile: is that the average for most yoyos?

I thought a saw a yyf blog post about a toy in japan for yoyos that you put it above and it measures the rpm’s. This was about 2 years ago. And Haru may have been joking with the “Its over 9000” joke. Not sure though.

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Google has already answered this for us!

OK, not Google. But you can use Google to find the answer.

Seems to be (on average) anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 rpm. So, Dragon Ball reference or no, Haru-Ray had it right!

I saw somewhere that a got over 10,000 rpms

Not that this is going to help, but a friend and I put a tiny stick-on magnet on my old Variflex yoyo and put it up to a reed switch that fed into a oscilloscope. Yeah, we were young and nerdy, but it was fun. I’ll ask him what rpm it was. Seems like I remember it not being as fast as we thought it would be…
I’ll get back on this one… :wink:

The science in what way?
All the gyroscopic action, and the different yoyo specs and so on?
I have an old Unimat lathe, was thinking it would be fun to turn your own yoyo (make it in metal working terms :slight_smile: ). Could buy some bearings and make the rest, would be pretty cool and random!

Another way to estimate a yoyo’s revolutions per minute is to put year ear up close to it while it’s spinning, and estimate or match the frequency of the fundamental tone (lowest “hum” sound) coming from the yoyo. I just estimated it, but on a soft throw I got about 60 Hz or more (a guess)… so… 60 revs/second times 60 sec/min = 1200 rpm.

I’m sure you could match up the low hum with a tone generator off an iPhone app or something and get a pretty accurate Hz then convert to rpm.

You’re absolutely right. Anyone with a set of tuning forks or a digital tuner can do this and get a fairly accurate result.