Just out of curiosity, I got a few questions. Yesterday, I noticed when flicking my pixel bearings after cleaning them the spin time was much lower maybe like 8-9 seconds. I remember last time I cleaned them it was around 20 seconds. Does this have any connection to the life of the bearing or does it mean nothing at all? How long do your unresponsive bearings usually last before you need to replace them?
I have been running mine dry which I have read is a highly contested subject. Figured I’d include that.
I searched a ton and didn’t see this topic about a flick time slowing correlation to a bearings life. Maybe I missed it. I have spent hours reading through searches on here. There’s a lot of useful information but didn’t see anything regarding that, figured I’d just ask.
I been cleaning my bearings with acetone and then using the air compressor.
Did you remove the shields? I have bearings that have lasted years and years and I run all of them dry. It sounds like yours are just not really clean. Dirty bearings are noisy and noisy bearings are dirty.
I live in Pittsburgh. It can be humid some but not dusty. I been having issues with my pixel bearings becoming responsive since I got both of them. That’s kinda why I was wondering if they are dying on me. It seems like I get a week max out of them before they become responsive.
a quick google search shows that RC car bearings should last between 80,000 and 100,000 miles of spin time. a yoyo is a much less demanding environment than an RC car, even when run dry i’d expect much longer life span from a bearing inside a yoyo.
That has been my theory, I was told they come with dark matter lube in them. I been wondering if maybe when I got them it was caked up because one of them became responsive within the first 30 minutes.
You should pick up a couple NSK bearings that have 8 larger balls instead of 10 smaller ones and are non shielded. They are designed and shipped dry. They are ultra smooth and you never add lube
Searching for “flick time” is too restrictive. Look for bearing care and/or maintenance. “Flick time” is touched on in most of them but it probably won’t be specified as such. Normally people mention spinning on a pencil but it’s not always mentioned in bearing care.
Pixel bearings do not come with Dark Matter Lube inside them. They’re made by iYoYo and CLYW, not YYF, so I don’t see why they’d have Dark Matter Lube inside. Furthermore, Dark Matter Lube, as suggested by its name, is black in colour while the lube inside Pixel bearings are clear.
Thank you. Sometimes I’ll use Google to search subjects on here by typing in the subject I want and then yoyoexpert and it seems to find things better sometimes.
I found a few posts about people asking if flick time mattered at all and seen people said it doesn’t. I was curious if a decline in flick time means anything. It’s not a huge deal just something I was curious about. I’m gonna do some more research thanks for sharing the link.
@Hanker I spoke directly with iYoYo on Instagram and they told me they used YYF Dark Matter. I’m not sure if it was incorrect information but that’s what I was told.
Ahhhh I see. That should be accurate then. It must have been a recent development as mine are definitely not lubed with dark matter lube when I got them a year or two back.
That might explain the spin time issues that you’re facing though, as dark matter lube is no ordinary lube. It is a wet dry lube. A dry lube is usually some form of carbon powder applied directly to the bearing, usually with a brush. YYF’s dark matter lube suspends the carbon powder in a liquid that evaporates quickly, like alcohol, so it is much easier to apply the lube and you can apply the lube more evenly throughout the bearing. Therefore, it is a wet (contains liquid) dry (carbon powder based) lube. The problem with dry lube is that you cannot put too much of it, otherwise you’d destroy the bearing as too much carbon powder would end up creating more friction (instead of reducing friction) in the bearing and cause the bearing to slow down or even lock up. And since the powder is made of carbon, you can’t use organic solvents that you’d usually use like alcohol and acetone to dissolve it, which makes it nigh impossible to remove after being applied, but the lube will last pretty much forever after applying it.
If you’ve gotten these bearings recently, it might be possible that there was too much dark matter lube in them, but the lube didn’t fully evaporate, which would allow the bearing to spin quite freely thanks to the liquid. When you cleaned them, you added a liquid which would also suspend the carbon powder. Then, once the lube or your cleaning solution fully evaporates and dries out, the carbon settles on the bearings and causes the bearing slow down due to having too much carbon powder creating friction in the bearing and hence you’re only experiencing the reduced spin time now. Also, depending on what kind of carbon powder is being used in YYF’s dark matter lube, the powder may not be suspended at all when you clean it and it might just be stuck on the inside on the bearing, like how a small bit of the graphite lead of a pencil gets stuck to the paper when you write with it. This would usually happen with graphite-based dry lube, which is what most dry lubes are based on.
Also, bearings coming out of the box becoming noisy or responsive in a short amount of time is normal. I almost always have to clean every single new bearing I receive because all of them become noisy or responsive in an hour or so. I think it might be due to the dust in the package getting into the bearing or something. A bearing getting responsive after a week is also pretty normal. How quickly a bearing gets noisy or responsive is dependent on a lot of factors, like humidity, presence of pets, amount of dust in the environment, frequency of playing, frequency of bringing the yoyo out and a number of other factors.
Thank you for all that information. That helps a lot. They told me to add dark matter but at the time I didn’t have any and was reading mixed reviews about it so I just thought cleaning it would help. I read after I did once that acetone I am using does not help with removing dark matter. Is there anything I can do at this point to fix it? They aren’t playing like extremely worse just yet but I have noticed it.
I just started playing unresponsive the last few months so I’m still learning. I just got a first base that was never used unresponsive and it did something similar as well. It became responsive in the first hour or so but it went away. I ended up cleaning that bearing along with the pixels and that’s how I noticed the big difference in flick time. The center trac was more than double than my two pixels. I also noticed my one shielded bearings that came from BST that I use aot hasnt become responsive as often but I’m not sure if that has a factor in helping them stay unresponsive or not.