Metal Drifter Mods

Ever since 2011 the drifter doesn’t have spacers and they changed the colors from black,gold and dark blue to purple,green,light blue.

Where does everyone get strings and stuff from? From the online store here?

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Glad it’s working out for you.

I put a YYE 100% Poly string on my son’s Metal Drifter. I am going to clean some more bearings tomorrow. I’ve got at least 5-8 A-sized bearings to give a good cleaning too(Love the inexpensive Duncans! ProZ’s are way fun! Freakhands/FH2’s are cheap too and massively fun!).

I’ll go double check my Metal Drifter. It’s a darker blue. But I got it in 2011 and I started in this whole yoyo thing in May of 2011, so it’s likely mine doesn’t use spacers. Depends on how motivated I feel. I know, it seems silly but sometimes I’m too lazy to open a yoyo! I gotta get up, walk over to the case, open the case, take the yoyo out…

I order my strings from YYE. There are other places I get stuff from, but for the most part, I go to YYE for my strings.

I bought the aceton and mineral spirits from Home Depot by the quart. But, this stuff I get is fairly common stuff you can get at probably almost any hardware store. It’s nothing special. There’s an OSH and Lowes nearby as well. You can even get it at Wal-Mart.

I’ll have to check into that, when I did my cleaning I read that lighter fluid can be used and that’s what I had off hand so that’s what I used and worked well, when I cleaned the bearing itself with the little paper strips, they came out cleaned the 1st time everytime even after throwing it for about 30 minutes but it seemed to do the trick.

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Make sure your not deceived by the fact the the spacers are silver and look like a part of the actual yoyo half. That’s what seems to happen a lot. I haven’t bought a new one though.

Its all one piece, heres a couple pics, just bought this one maybe 4 weeks ago

Exactly the same as what I bought my son. Same color too.

Are the old colors(black, blue, gold) still with the spacers? Or are all the stock at stores now the new one piece design?

And just one more pic cause i got bored with a semi finished polish job, on my drifter the blue is actually lighter then whats on the caps so i stripped them then lightly sanded on fine grit 800 then polished to see how they would come out.

Not to bad, looks a bit better then the blue did with the rim like it is but eventually i’ll end up polishing the entire thing. Just need to go up with a 2k grit paper and finish so it looks like a mirror.

I think the darker blue, gold and black ones are using the spacers. I just checked mine and a spacer fell out. I want to swap spacers around but it’s 12:46AM and I gotta get to bed soon. I can play with spacers while I am cleaning bearings.

I think the newer light blue, green, orange and red are the newer Metal Drifters ad I am ASSUMING that they do not have spacers in them.

How wide is the gap on a stock Drifter?
I wonder if you could put a Wide Gap bearing in it.

It’s pretty wide for an A bearing yo-yo. If I were to guess, maybe around 3.5 millimeters, or more.

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Just saying here:
I use to have a black Metal Drifter (the old color) without any spacers in them.

This is my Duncan Metal Drifter  :)  :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

With the 3.40mm spacers in mine, it has a gap of 3.16mm. However, I can’t guarantee that those are the stock spacers since I got mine from the b/s/t. With that said, I feel that the gap width is just fine, but if you wanted it wider you could always shim it some. (There’s .84mm of bearing hiding in the halves of the yo-yo.) My main gripe with the Drifter is its lack of stability and a wider gap will only hurt it more in that regard.

I didn’t know you could pop the axle out of the drifter! Must Z-stack!

Yeah, there are screw caps over the nut and bolt. Pop those off and I suppose with the right elements, you could easily hubstack this throw.

Only the originals had the removable spacers. All new black, blue, gold, ect… don’t. Its pre cut. I was so mad about this I stop buyin them. You can tell the difference on the packaging if its new or old.

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