What’s that? Civilized discourse on Discourse? 
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Late to the party… but having worked on many continents, I’ve seen the most upstanding integrity driven and focused humans this race has produced. None were constrained to a particular continent. I’ve also seen the lowest low energy lying empty minded scoundrel’s this race has produced. Again, none were constrained to a particular continent. BUT, the d-bags are in the vast majority everywhere! Don’t let tribalism, which is also nationalism, obscure the view through your window. See people for who they are, not where they come from. But on that note, even being a Navy vet, this video is not biased or hyperbole imho… change the world no matter where you are from and what you buy from where. We all need it.
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” C. Jung
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This is what i was thinking of. He said sometimes he’d have to trash as many as 50% of a run from an American shop vs a 90% A grade rate from the Chinese shops he’s been working with.
Also, he doesn’t get all of his yoyos done in China, as far as i know he still gets some stuff machined by OD.
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Sounds like a Question Someone would have posed in 1982, a little late for this.
Everything can be made but there should be unity in people.i want everything to be made in India. Actually we are bringing bullet train in India from Japan and all the people are learning about that .
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I would have to imagine that yoyo manufacturing would be a little different though. I mean, it requires a pretty high skill set to run that kind of machinery, and I don’t imagine it would take very much to get them all packed up and shipped either.
But even still, the price point is the one thing that I would find concerning about the whole process. I just hope that people are getting compensated appropriately for the work that they are doing.
There has to be a compromise somewhere in the production line for chinese-manufactured yo-yos to be so cheap…
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That main reason we started to get some parts machined there is because it’s better overall for our process with our anodizers. I had to trash over 50% of the OG pelicans. Only 10% were a grades. With the P19 were at about 85% A grades 10% glitches and 5% trashed after they get back from our ano shops. I still have about 100 Raws waiting on ano here before I can equally compare the stats for equal size runs of a yo-yo that was only slightly adjusted.
Disclaimer my QC is extremely strick - my 50% teashed rate might have been much lower for others.
Raw pricing really isn’t much of a factor for us because it’s basically the same. Turn around time is much quicker on runs and protos.
I’m just trying to offer the highest quality product I can. If I need to machine in China, anodizer in France, and just assemble here that would be ok with me in the end, if that’s the best product I can make available.
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A couple things, one is American manufacturers often pay in USD, which when converted to Yuan becomes quite a bit more. Basically a dollar in China is worth more than a dollar here. Costs of living in China are fairly cheaper as well, food isn’t as expensive and as far as I know housing isn’t as expensive either.
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I wonder if Chinese yoyo players get mad on their forums that Chinese machine shops keep making yoyos for American companies, or if they are just proud to be the place where most of the best yoyos in the world get machined.
It’s always been weird to me that American players aren’t more proud that North America is where arguably most of the best yoyos in the world are designed, and are so much more concerned with where they get made. North America is the idea leader in this industry, by a wiiiide margin. That alone is pretty amazing. Nothing wrong with being amazing at one part of something and then farming out the nuts and bolts.
At the end of the day, Chris and I are just weird art nerds who want to make neat stuff and would prefer to spend as little time as possible dealing with production issues. Working with machine shops in China has reduced our stress level over production DRASTICALLY. We aren’t really making enough yoyos to merit a huge reduction in cost (cost savings mostly come with volume, we are not doing volume lol), but it’s definitely been an overall gain in terms of production quality, reject rates, and how much time we have to spend managing it.
Anyway, good discussion. Nice to see that attitudes are coming around a bit on this. I mean, everyone roots for their local sports team but almost none of those dudes are from that city and that never seems to be a problem. You do the best you can with whatever resources you can find, and at the end of it you want to have something you can be proud of. We’re super proud of what CLYW is releasing right now, and what’s on the horizon. Hope everyone enjoys all the new new that we’re working on. 
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Happy b-day Steve!
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I am reminded of the capitalistic motto: adapt; or die.
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Most chinese shops offer a complete product. That is machining, anodization, pads, assembly.
Especially anodizing is critical. If you have one shop do your machining and a completely unrelated shop do the anodization, as Jake put it, you end up with a lot of scrap. Even if you try to consider the material build up during anodizing (at least what the shop tells you before), you might lose the entire batch. Chinese shops either do their anodizing themselves or at least are in close cooperation with external shops. They can adapt and overcome issues together.
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^^^ And this is huge, not just from a scrap rate perspective but from a pure cost perspective. Otherwise you are paying a machine shop to carefully box up all your stuff and ship it to another vendor, and then that vendor has to carefully unbox it all, prep it, anodize it, re-pack it, and then pay to ship it to you, who then has to come up with the staff to assemble and test all of it.
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:thatscapitalism:
If you don’t like that products are being made in China, stop buying Chinese products. What? They’re cheaper? Well, nevermind then.
I remember buying a YoYofficer five years ago because I thought the hate towards China was silly. Now everyone is using them to produce throws because everyone wants cheap, mass produced yoyos and people are still complaining. What you can buy today for ~$50 is insane. If you want more domestic-made yoyos, stop buying Chinese-made throws and start paying extra for domestic. If you want cheap, buy plastic and embrace the vibe. You get what you pay for and if you demand the best throws at the cheapest prices, don’t be shocked that it’s made in a country that pays its workers less than a living wage in your home country. You vote with your wallet and our collective wallets want cheap metal throws from China, so we’ve gotten what we’ve paid for.
Yoyos don’t make you a better thrower, practice does. Stop obsessing about “buttery smooth” yoyos at dirt cheap prices and embrace the fact that you play with toys and those toys don’t have to be perfect. As I’ve heard countless times in martial arts and powerlifting, “shut up and train!”
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Yes but I am very lazy and training takes work. Here, have my money!!
(Can I pay people in China to train me while I sleep?)
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There is apparently quite a bit of community caché in finding amazing bargains, i.e., throws that perform way above their price point. I guess you get a gold star if you are one of the first to discover a new buttery smooth yoyo at a dirt cheap price.
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I think the problem is at least partially due to the community’s obsessions with smoothness. Obviously I don’t know how much vibe during QC turns an A grade to a B grade(or C grade), but I do see a community obsessed with how smooth a yoyo feels when thrown. Maybe it’s because I’m an old man and I’ve played with yoyos that vibe like a magic fingers bed without a care, but it seems like it’s something that’s overly fixated on. It does seem to me that if the community cared about vibe less, then many of those B grades could have been sold as A. Is that good or bad? No idea.
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I think it is hard to look at a yoyo that is supposedly made to today’s machining standards and not think something is wrong with it if it has a lot of vibe. It doesn’t take an obsession with smoothness to be haunted by this suspicion.
Well, lets say you’re buying a luxury car. For the same price, one car is significantly more noisy than the other. Same model, just one car is much louder. Which car would you chose to buy? Vibe is an indication of an error in the yoyo. Whether it’s the halves weren’t machined perfectly concentrically or the bearing seat is too loose, it’s something. If I’m paying for a product, why shouldn’t I expect a yoyo that was machined perfectly? There is no excuse for that now. Back then, machine tolerances weren’t great. Ironically, Chinese manufacturing actually aided in providing yoyos with better tolerances. Back then, you either had to buy a One Drop, General Yo, or go over seas to companies like Oxygene for yoyos without vibe. So is it an obsession with vibe, or simply rightfully expecting the best product possible for the price?
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