In my googling I came across a Chinese company called Konbo international. http://www.konbo.com/en/ I don’t know anything about them and details are hard to come by. Nobody seems to stock their stuff and I mostly found references to them at trade shows etc. After a while I found some of their yoyos on ebay. Twelve bucks for a metal yo seemed worth a look. After a couple of weeks wait for it to arrive from Hong-Kong, it arrived today.
The yoyo is structured kind of like two steel bowls (see pics) held together by outside bolts on the axle. Mine has a blue baked on powder coating, though you can get them in brushed or polished steel too. On each side inside there’s a plastic response pad (starburst). custom metal shims hold the small bearing in place. It came with a full cotton string.
It’s heavy! 75 grams they say, and it feels solid as a rock on the string. With all that weight it sleeps for a looooong time. The gap is about the same as a wound in speedmaker. As for size it seems exactly the same width and diameter as my protostar. With all that momentum it’s very easy to land on the string.
It plays well. With the starburst it is responsive, but not overly so. It won’t return unless you ask it. With the comparatively narrow gap you can’t wind a lot of string into it before you get friction, but it’s not too bad. The recess in the starburst pad is large enough to accommodate a large bearing if you could figure out how to lock it to the thin axle. After disassembly it needs a bit of tuning to get rid of vibe, but then spins very clean.
So there it is - the Koyo metal. Cheap, heavy, strange, a reasonable player with possible modding potential.
I know this topic’s over a month old but this was probably the only info I could find on this yo-yo. My brother came across this yesterday while on the hunt for a cheap metal. I’m curious about several things…
First off, does this fly apart often (becoming unscrewed) in mid play? Or do the caps lock on pretty secure?
About the caps…they say it’s metal on the Ebay page, but for some reason, it looks like a metal coated plastic, or some real cheap metal when looking at your images.
I know what you said about the response system about how it won’t come up unless you want it to…with the narrower gap, does it allow for tricks like Mach 5 or Boingy Boing?
Lastly, due to it’s weight, how long of sleepers can you get from this? It appears to be a thin steel with a rounded lip, but I could be wrong.
Sorry for reviving/bumping an old topic, I personally think this is better than cluttering the boards with several of the same…plus maybe the OP may have some info as he owns one of these.
It tightens up securely and doesn’t fly apart. Those bolts are metal (but the inside shows some kind of anodizing which makes them look plastic.) The whole thing is cheaply made so don’t expect wonders.
The gap is probably too narrow for many modern string tricks. Really this yoyo is pretty terrible, and only of much interest if you find ways to mod it. Then again you can probably get one cheap enough to tinker if it strikes your fancy. The way the response pads are built it likes to gobble the string into knots occasionally.
The extreme weight means it sleeps for a loooong time, and when well tuned is very stable. With a thinner gap, tight response, long sleep time and cheapness, it may be of interest to someone as a metal offstring yoyo. Really I wouldn’t recommend it for anything unless cheapness and experimentation is the main factor.
Konbo/koyo also manufacture some other yoyos, some of which may be better quality. This one’s an oddity.
They are wasting perfectly good materials which could have been used to make a door handle or something.
Their products are not well thought out, they are poorly designed.
I don’t know what kind of culture or why a company would take pride in making terrible products but they’re there and they have the audacity to market these products as “high quality” with a straight face.
They clearly do not know anything about the products they manufacture and have no drive or enthusiasm for it.
And don’t support that seller on eBay selling these things.
Even their website is a complete non-functional POS
And it was just hacked/defaced.