pyro
HSPIN x At Design Lab COLLABORATION
DISTILLED COLOR release
In December 2005, the Pyro opened the door to competition metal yoyos. Over the next few years, brands all over the world rushed through it. Round, butterfly, or H-shape? DIF-PADs, proprietary pads, or ring pads? Bearing sizes were all over the place. New shapes showed up almost every month, and a model everyone called a classic could feel outdated six months later. If you were there for it, every month felt like a festival.
Out of all that chaos, one clear trend emerged: metal yoyos got smaller and lighter. Tricks got faster and more complex every year, and big, heavy yoyos had a harder time keeping up. After the YoYoFactory 888 took a World title in 2007, undersized throws went mainstream almost overnight. By around 2010, something close to 52mm had become the new “regular size.”
The Pyro was 55mm with a size D bearing. Plenty of players kept throwing it because they loved that size and weight. Still, the scene as a whole was slowly moving somewhere the Pyro wasn’t.
In 2011, HSPIN answered that shift with the Pyro III. They kept the silhouette and the flame pattern, and moved to a size L bearing, ring pads, a 52mm diameter, and a low-edge gap. From the outside it was unmistakably a Pyro, and inside it was right in step with the times. Given the time and resources they had, it was the right answer. Only 149 were made, and the Pyro III became the last Pyro HSPIN ever released.
But there may have been more than one right answer.
What if it had answered the same changes while keeping more of the Pyro’s DNA?
pyro is that other answer, the one that never came out in 2011.
We set exactly one rule: keep as much of what makes it a Pyro as possible. On top of that, it still had to give the era what it asked for: smaller, lighter, less string friction, and enough performance for modern tricks. Those two goals naturally fight each other. Keep the Pyro character and you give up performance. Chase performance and it stops being a Pyro. To get both, we went with the simplest approach we could think of. Instead of drawing a new shape, we trusted the one that already existed. Not adding, not subtracting, just scaling down.
We changed only two things.
1. SCALE
We took the original Pyro OG drawings and scaled them straight down to 0.945x (55mm → 52mm). The catch zone curve and the rim thickness keep their 2005 proportions. The 61g weight isn’t a number we aimed for. When you scale something uniformly, its volume drops by the cube of the scale factor. 0.945 cubed is about 0.845, and roughly 85% of 71.7g is 61g. It isn’t lighter because we cut weight out. It’s lighter because it’s smaller. The balance between the rim weight and the light center carries over exactly. If it feels dense for its size when you pick it up, you’re not imagining it.
Not everything scales, though. The bearing, axle, and pads stay the same size, so they’re relatively bigger inside the smaller body. Making those parts that don’t scale work with everything else is where the second change comes in.
Take nothing out, add nothing in, and make the Pyro smaller. We call this DISTILLED.
2. SHMOOVE RING
Modern yoyos usually lower the edges to cut down on sleep loss during complex tricks. That’s the route the Pyro III took. The Pyro, on the other hand, is a high-wall design, with tall walls on either side of the gap. And since the string doesn’t get any thinner when the body shrinks, the conditions are actually tougher than they were on the Pyro OG.
Lowering the edges would solve it. But that high-wall edge is the very outline that makes a Pyro a Pyro. So we left the outside alone. We made the Shmoove ring deeper and larger and widened the gap to match yoyos from that era, which gives the string room to escape on the inside. Without moving a single line of the outer profile, we brought performance up to where it can handle modern tricks. Lowering the edges would have been the efficient way. We took the long way around because we didn’t want to cut away even a little of this shape.
COLOR | Distilled Color
If the shape was distilled, the color should be distilled the same way. The Pyro OG’s red was a flame red, burning outward. When we let that red sink at the same ratio as the shape, it settled into a deep red close to wine. You can only tell it’s red when light hits it, and in the shadows it looks nearly black. It’s a red that holds its heat inside instead of burning outward. We didn’t change the color. The shape was DISTILLED, so the color was DISTILLED too.
We write pyro in all lowercase because it’s simply the Pyro made smaller.
We changed only two things. That’s why it’s still so much a Pyro.
SPECS
- Diameter: 52.0mm
- Width: 44mm
- Weight: 61g
- Bearing: Size D (HSPIN size / Double V-shape, 9-ball)
- Response: Ring pads (18mm OD × 13mm ID)
- Finish: Vintage Coating
- Color: Distilled Color (Deep Dark Red / Dark Red)
What comes next
What if the Pyro had made it through that era as pyro: still small, still size D, still high-wall? What would it have picked up, and what would it have let go of, over the next 15 years? Nobody has walked this road yet. pyro is the first step. Where it goes from here is something we want to find out together with the people who pick one up.