I’ve been interested in creating, engineering and producing my own yoyo. However, I considered the cost of acquiring my own equipment and decided that it wasn’t reasonable. So, is there any other way to go about doing this?
Is it possible to hire another yoyo company to create a yoyo?
And if so; the price?
Thanks,
SheepFarm
The only way to get reliable pricing is to approach a company with a serious design. Your average, ordinary guy will not have a clue, though some may try to sound like they do.
I’ll just share some suggestion here, and some things I learn when making my own yoyo.
First of all, you had to have a really strong concept about what you want to make, in this case a yoyo design. This include the general shape and size of the yoyo, and the general feel you try to archive.
Next is to try any yoyo that close to what you want to make. I mean, lets face it, these day there are tons of yoyo out there already, and there’s a chance something is very close to what you want but not quite.
After you have a very strong concept of the yoyo you want to make, it is time to make a CAD model on the yoyo, I guess this is far better than going to a machine shop with a rough sketch, because; 1) the machinist can understand what you want better, and most importantly 2) you can visualize what the yoyo would become in real life.
And the last step is just find a machinist to make your design.
There’s many other things to do other than what I said here though.
I would say the hardest part would be all the written out dimensions on paper. If you could find someone to write a cnc program for you it would be in his hands from there as long as you have all of your dimensions written down. Metal is cheap so parts wouldn’t be the problem. If I were to take a stab in the dark I would say it could take a cnc machinist about 40-60 hours to write the cnc program and make the yoyo. At anywhere from $40-60 bucks an hour that could cost on the low $1600 bucks for that alone. Once that legwork is done though I don’t think it would be bad from there. However if you want to make improvements you would have to pay for another cnc program to be written… Idk I honestly have no real idea but that’s where my mind would be at.
If you can explain good enough, find someone who have access to cnc machine… you should be able to make some. I designed one myself, send it to a fellow yoyoer from the US then he take it to the machinist (dti beast), also a friend of mine made some good ones in local cnc. Both of us has no engineering background whatsoever. Draw the yoyo and the spec you want it to be as detailed as possible, either hand drawn (in proper scale) or better use cad (I used cadstd free), then show the machinist how actual yoyos look like, the total weight, where the critical parts are, and how it works. It’s all trial and error in the beginning.
Prices will vary depending on the machinist
Your best bet is to design your throw using CAD and then get an estimate from a couple local machinist on producing it. Keep in mind there will probly be a couple different prototypes since they’re not familiar with yoyos and you’re not familiar with the designing of them so it will get rather spendy. We used to have bigbrotheryoyos a while back that would make your design for $50 but the normal quotes I think start around $500 and can pass the 1k mark because a lot of designs require specific tooling.
It’d be best to get with one of the upcoming manufactueres on this oard and ask them how they did it though.
Thank you ALL!