Response

One of my bearings needed to be cleaned. It was my first time cleaning a bearing and once I was done the yoyo was super responsive. I was told to expect this but after 30 min. It didn’t get any better. I used paint thinner to clean the bearing and yoyo jam thin lube. Is this normal for a yoyo bearing or did I do something wrong?

Did you dry the bearing after cleaning?

Oh yeah, next time, post this in the Modification/Maintenance Section. :slight_smile:

Will do. Yeah I let it set for 10 min.

Hmm… Usually, I flick dry my bearing on the end of a pencil, then, just to be sure, I let it air dry for a while. If you cleaned the bearing properly, then it should be okay. That leaves the lube. How much did you apply to the bearing?

Two small drops

Re reading, only 10 minutes to dry naturally is very short. The better route would have been flick drying it, or getting a can of compressed air and blowing it in the bearing. In all likelihood you may just have to keep playing it.

How long did you soak it in the paint thinner? And I assume the bearing was deshielded?

Without knowing the exact size of the “small” drops, it could still have been too much lube. And when you’ve put too much, it takes forever to break’em in.

If you’re cleaning using mineral spirits, it takes 15-30 minutes for it to evaporate, even if drained. Spinning and blowing the bearing out can reduce this to seconds.

After cleaning, lube should be sparse. Dip a needle in the lube of choice(YYJ thin, YYF THIN peformance oil or VM4), touch that to 1 or 2 balls, spin. Re-shield and play.

I gotta ask: Did you de-shield the bearing in the first place?

It is still responsive for 1 of 3 reasons.

  1. You put too much lube on the bearing. When I clean my bearings I never lube them. When I first started I used a tiny tiny drop of lube on each bearing, but I noticed how much spin time it took away and sometimes made the bearing responsive so I stopped lubing. Bearings last forever as long as you clean them and keep them away from water. Not lubing a bearing isn’t going to hurt your wallet that much by causing you to have to buy a replacement in a year instead of 2 years.

  2. The bearing didn’t get cleaned well enough. I would make sure when you clean your bearings to put them in some type of container that will allow you to shake the bearing while in whatever it is you use to clean it. Make sure you shake hard a few times, let it soak for at least 15 minutes (longer soaking can’t hurt), then shake again before taking the bearing out. Also, when you go to take the bearing out try to be careful about not having the bearing near the junk that came out of it. It’s hard to see, but if you look close enough you can see the stuff that the mineral spirits cleaned out of your bearing. Just try to use a pencil or something that type of shape and move the bearing away from the stuff that came out before removing it from the container and drying it.

  3. It could just be a defective bearing. Not much to say on this one. Some bearings just have a defect that causes them to malfunction.

One thing I forgot to mention is your actual response “pads”. If you’re using actual pads then the problem is most certainly the bearing. However, if you used flowable silicone to do the response yourself then you may have left a little too much silicone in the recess causing the “pad” to stick out above the recess which will cause you to have a responsive yoyo.

Hope this helped.

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Most likely too much lube. When I clean my bearings I never lube them, I just put them on the tip of a pen or pencil and use some compressed air to dry them out and make sure that they’re spinning as they should. Once in a while I put 1 tiny drop of lube in a bearing if it gets painfully noisy.

I de-shielded the bearing before cleaning it.

What kind of container did you use?