What do you wooden yoyo makers find to be the woods that tend to produce the smoothest spinning yoyos?
The most consistent I have found to be are:
Sugar (rock) maple
Spotted Gum
Karri
Wenge
Pelawan
Red gum
White oak
One the flipside, some of the most difficult to produce smooth yoyos I find to be are:
Walnut
Myrtle beech
Purpleheart
Zebrano
It’s possible to produce smooth yoyos with these, they just seems to yield a far higher dud rate.
Any others that you know of?
Laminated wood like Brad Countryman used to make/use.
After decades of ‘wood’ yoyos; B/C landed on the laminated wood material. He told me that the Best consistency results from consistent weight distribution throughout the material.
Brad told me that the weight factor of the glue is constant. And in the laminate; approx.50% of the weight is glue.
By using laminates; it pretty much minimizes weight density anomalies within turned halves and from half to half.
I have to go to work now… I will go into better detail later…
Yeah, laminated wood has a far more even density that natural wood.
Hmm – this is purely based on wood having variable density? I guess that makes sense. So I guess the woods with the most consistent density would work best for yoyos.
Variable density is not something you have to worry about with metal or plastic, is it? I know plastic yoyos can be more vibey than metal, but modern plastics are quite good, at least the ones I’ve tried.
Yeah. Variable density throughout the body. Molded plastic definitely suffers from the same thing but you can control for it by adjusting where are you injecting the plastic, temperature, the pressure, etc. (Compared to wood where mother nature controlled - or didnt - for that. LOL.)
Very complicated formula to get right. Smooth molded yo-yos are always an achievement because there are so many factors that can cause variable density across the body therefore vibration. And being able to reproduce results from run to run is another achievement in molding plastic just because so many factors can cause issues.
I remember with YoYoJam in Florida just the change in humidity could create a nightmare for molding issues. Lol.
And the more weight you put towards the edge for better spin in the design the more likely you are going to give yourselves issues. 
It’s all about the density with wooden yoyos. Uneven density will result in very wobbly yoyos.
From what I can tell, the wider the diameter of the tree trunk, the more consistent the density of the lumber is. Also, it seems generally speaking, that the harder a wood is, the less problems there are with uneven density. All the gum wood I use to make yoyos with are very hard and yield very smooth spinning yoyos.
There are other factors that affect density though such as the moisture in the wood as well as the environment the wood is kept in.
Just when I and said that, I made two yoyos out of wood I knew to have very uneven density and they turned out really smooth.
Just when you think you have it all figured out. LOL.
