That was actually an accidental ding!
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Titanium
accidental ding
Som’at dunt maff hurr
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I have found that the brake pads drag on the bearing. I spent some time trimming the ends down a little bit and it seemed to improve play.l, allowing the bearing to free spin, and remains tug responsive. I noticed this after swapping bearings, as orginal bearing that was in is really noisy, maybe dirtied up a bit with string bits and cork dust, so I’ll try cleaning it before I send this out.
Who is next?
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Please report back. It would be odd that they might drag, but I’d believe it. I notice that a couple of my units slow down much faster than others, and manufacturing tolerance of the cork leading to a smaller gap before the bearing might explain it?
In any case, how are you liking it so far?
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I guess I never even considered a post-machining HT. I assume it’s an annealing step to soften the Ti since it was work hardened?
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Not really soften, no. I’m not trying to change any of the materials properties at all, only relieve the stresses inside the material. A low temperature (~900-1100F) bake for like 1.5-2 hours allows for the material to normalize without changing much about the heat treatment state according to my copy of Vol.4 of the ASM handbook:
I’m not working with plate or anything, but I am removing different amounts of material from different sides of a rather thin wall. So far I’ve noticed an easier time removing vibe, so I think it’s worth it if I don’t have the kind of money or machinery to cut both sides of a yoyo in one go. The distortion is reasonably rather minimal, but if I can cut down the incidence of nail vibe or whatever else might go wrong, it’s worth it to me.
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Stress-relieving was probably the better term, but to be pedantic, stress relieving does tend to reduce hardness slightly. 
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I’m also known to get baked for stress relief every now and again
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Holy cow I forgot I still have this PiF!!! Who is next?!
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Oh right. I gotta do that still.
The last couple months have DISSAPPEARED. Holy crap.
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Wait a minute, doc! Are you telling me I just lost 8 months?!
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Having kids sure does make it feel that way at times
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Im down to give it a go
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I finally have gotten this shipped. I have a ton of things going on personally that led me to keep pushing this off, so I will be sitting out from PiFs in the future.
I hope Chris has better luck getting the response and string combo dialed in than I did. It’s a fun YoYo but I just never got around to getting it perfect for me.
Thanks for the share and I am very sorry I had kept it so long, my bad everyone.
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I’m so excited to have found this thread. I had a cold fusion as a kid, and this seems to have all that lovely DNA. I’m also down to pick up one of the organic throws if that becomes an option.
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So I’ve been kinda out of everything lately. Wanted to come back and give a few quick updates.
First and foremost, the late models are still coming. My god awful schedule is killing me slowly from the inside out and the delays just start coming (and they don’t stop coming), but my production queue is still gonna get cut.
So what’s been going on since the last update?
Had a kid
Back at the beginning of October, my wife and I had our first kid. She’s doing great, she’s annoyingly adorable, and it’s been a pretty fun time. It’s also been EXHAUSTING. I expected to be tired, but this hits differently than I expected. Where I used to have the stamina for at least 2 nights of after-hours machining (essentially work my day job from roughly 12-8PM, then yoyos from 8PM-12AM), I have had energy and time for maybe one night a week, sometimes one every couple. That’s obviously slowed me down a LOT in most aspects of my hobby stuff. My energy levels are starting to stabilize a little, but it’s still rough.
Went on parental leave
My wife and I decided to split our leave to give us the longest period of time without needing to put the kid into daycare and allow us time to find the right solution. She obviously went first. We are fortunate enough to live in California, and the state supported about 3 months of leave through the State Disability Insurance system. Kinda nice to see some of the money they pull out of every paycheck come back to us for once instead of having it disappear into a black hole.
Anyway, she went back to work at the beginning of January. I started my proper leave the day she went back. I took 2 weeks off right when the kid got here so that I could make sure that she and my wife were set up properly and that my wife was properly taken care of while she was recovering from the worst of the C-section. We decided to just eat the cost of me taking 2 weeks completely unpaid so I could take the full benefit of California’s Paid Family Leave time for bonding.
Won't be back at work until the end of February
CA’s PFL system gives 8 weeks in a 12 month period, and I’m taking almost all of the available time (01/05-02/25). During this time, I’m a full-time stay-at-home parent. It’s been pretty cool watching my daughter learn the controls. It’s also been weird learning all the stuff that humans don’t just come pre-programmed with.
So what was the holdup before that?
Oh good lord it's been over a year
I hate that this is a thing, but I really don’t want to make people think I’ve forgotten it. I never planned for this to take anywhere near that long, but here we are.
Here’s a quick recap of delays
Found out my wife was pregnant
In the later half of February last year we found out we were having our first kid. Wasn’t at all unwelcome, but it was somewhat unexpected. We never specifically tried to have a kid, but we made the mutual and conscious decision to stop specifically trying not to have one. We were looking at family and friends that were actively trying for a year or more with no results and figured “it’ll probably be a while.” We talked that out in November.
Had the one month appointment at the end of February last year. Welp.
In any case, there were a few weeks where my wife needed a fair bit of extra support at home for various reasons, so I didn’t really touch the machines after hours for a bit.
The lathe encoder went out
I ordered the material in mid march, it got to me a couple weeks later, but then at the beginning of April the encoder that reports the rate of spindle rotation to the machine controller went out and destroyed my ability to run titanium parts. The promised lead time waas 2-3 weeks, ended up being almost 2 months
Spent the rest of June refining the program and making the first articles
I got a couple of the V2 units cut just ahead of nationals so I could get some early feedback on the changes between V1 and V2, ended up coming out fairly heavy and a lot less responsive than I wanted. Made a few more design changes and performed some maintenance on the lathe to reduce some dimensional errors. Made some minor changes to the design to kinda split the difference between V1 and V2.
August saw an electrical overhaul of my shop
As I was starting the cutting, my boss and I finally got to the point in our shop upgrades that we were ready to pull wires and get rid of the extension cords feeding every machine in the shop. Lots of work went into the upgrade. We added a gigantic fuse panel (we still need to add 2 more, but this one got us back up) and pulled a LOT of copper. It slowed me down a fair bit, but I was able to creep forward on progress
Finally made the final adjustments and documentations to ship out the early units at the end of September
Baby
See above.
So what now?
Work that's happening during my leave
The big change for the late units is going to be fit and finish. I want to experiment with blasted finishes, anodization color, potentially hardcoat ano, polishing, and maybe some heat treatment with color. Some of that (Type 3 ano color, blasting, possibly electropolishing) is going to happen in-house, but there are other things that I just don’t have the facilities or equipment to do.
Hard coat anodization (and possibly dye-preg tint) is gonna need to go through someone else. I’ve been talking with a few companies about the possibillity (and cost for a sample run) and making some design changes to produce a variant of the prototype that will undergo type 2 anodization.
I’ve also been trying to find a company that might be able to get these to a very high-grade polish without changing much dimensionally or warping them. That one’s been harder.
If I can manage it, I’ll get an electropolishing or electroplasma polishing cell up and running pretty soon after I’m back at work. We need to develop one during my day job anyway, but I’m figuring out the process as I go. If I figure it out properly, that’ll be the way to go for polishing.
Past that, I’m working to make very minor changes to geometry to reflect the feedback I’ve gotten on the V2.1 earlies and updating my programs and ordering more material.
Return to work
So I’m back at the end of February, like I said. My wife’s mother is coming into town for a couple weeks as I get back to the shop to essentially be a live-in nanny. I’d love to say that will give me a couple weeks to have free time after work, but I just don’t know yet. The only promise I’ve got is that I will get things moving as quickly as I am able.
I do know that once my MiL leaves I’ll be dropping to 3 days a week until we have a daycare solution figured out. My wife works for the local university, so we’ve been trying to get into their on-campus daycare. The cost is reasonable for half-day care, but they won’t give details on the wait list. Crossing fingers we get in quick.
Spindle repair/rebuild
My boss and I were talking about this way back in April just before the encoder died. It’s really the only way that I’ll be able to eliminate cosmetic errors completely. We still haven’t managed to get it done. I got us quotes, I found the company that’d be able to do it right for the right price, I got the manufacturer to tell me how to pull it out, everything we needed. Still hasn’t happened. So many other things popped up one after another in the shop that it’s just fallen by the wayside. I’m still trying to get it done, but I have no idea when it’ll actually happen.
When it does happen, it will absolutely take the lathe offline for at least a month.
Day job
Probably the most important thing I get done when I’m back is to learn the new machine and work through an urgent client project. We had a machine stolen from us by a shipping company, so my boss just went through about a month of frantic searching for a replacement that fits our purpose. The guy literally moved a bed into the office so that he could be up and ready early enough to talk to companies all over the world while being connected to the server resources. I don’t even know how often he even goes home at this point.
Anyway, I now have to learn and get trained on another machine system and get up to speed with the CAM for it. We’ll see how much speedrunning that takes out of me. Good news is that the replacement machine is essentially brand new (instead of being 20 years old) and has the potential to make us a fair bit of money. If I can turn that into spindle repair (or a new lathe) then that’ll be super nice.
As always I’ll be as open as I can be about things, so if you have questions or concernes feel free to toss them at me here or in DM’s. Sorry this process has gotten mired in the swamp of time, I deeply, DEEPLY appreciate the patience that has been shown so far.
I’ll keep updating as I have things to share.
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Exactly what I like to hear. I think the design direction has been successful so far 
I do have plans to make more of them, and they’re WAY simpler to cut than the Queens, but I gotta keep focus when I get back into cutting. The Queens take priority.
I identify with that remark. No worries on keeping it to yourself, I still have to find time to write the PiF post to help keep track. I’ve got the second PiF unit on my desk still >_>
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