In the beginning of this year I thought about what I liked in a yoyo, looking back at all the previous designs we made and others yoyos from my personal collection.
At first I thought this was pretty difficult to boil down to a specific design given all the great yoyos out there, but I settled on a pretty clear picture how the yoyo should look and feel like.
I’ve always loved the compact feel of slightly undersized yoyos, paired with reduced weight. However, most of my yoyos that fit this category have a pretty narrow catchzone or are narrow in general. The new yoyo should compensate this with a more modern width. While larger monometal yoyos (56mm+) offer substantial MMOI, smaller undersized yoyos lack inertia and thus desirable stability. This meant the yoyo had to have a bimetal contruction, giving it enough rimweight to perform like a fullsize competition yoyo. There is something inherently amazing about yoyos that have higher RPM but still great stability and spintime. I knew I wanted the new yoyo to feel exactly like that. Next up was the mission to have a “can do it all” yoyo that does everything I want to mess around with. Long combos, horizontals, fingerspins, grinds, finger grinds, thumbgrinds, rejections, complicated tech. The design had to allow for all of these tricks.
So all in all I wanted to create the ultimate fun yoyo that can do all these tricks, have great stability and spintime while at the same time feel agile and snappy with enough RPM to make you forget about kickback. And while thinking I would never make such a design happen, the α emerged and crushed my doubts. It is everything I could have hoped for. It is amazing.
Diameter: 53 mm
Width: 45 mm
Weight: 63.5 g
Gap: 4.5 mm
The α is a quick and snappy powerhouse without kickback but with a massive gap for any kind of complex tech, a wide catchzone for horizontals, blasted surfaces, IRGs, and concave profile for amazing grinds, a stepped profile for great rejection launches and the tried and proven amazing inner cup for top tier fingerspins.
Release will be this fall. 