Alright, I’m here to give you the scoop on my first machine shop made yoyo! I’ll go full transparency on everything so you know what all I went through, my thought process, and the future.
Background
I had a grail yo-yo in mind, but it didn’t exist yet. I wanted a super durable yo-yo for every-day-carry, or the apocalypse, you choose. Something thin and pocketable, that played well, and could withstand abuse. I wanted to be able to leave it in my pocket and wade into salt water, get mud on it, drop it in a puddle of oil, clean it with a harsh cleaner, whack it on the ground, and then have it come out of all that and still play great. After a lot of research I selected Ultem as the material. It’s a very popular super plastic but hasn’t been used in the yo-yo world yet. Which leads me into…
Machining
None of the normal yo-yo machine shops worked with Ultem so I sought out quotes from about a dozen different general purpose machine shops. For 3 prototypes prices ranged from about $85 per unit to more than $900 per unit. A lot of shops boasting the ability to turn one off projects ghosted me. Eventually I selected PartsBadger as the shop. They are based in Wisconsin but also have overseas machining capabilities. Final price when ordering 3x protos came to $91.12 per unit.
The Throw
Here are the stats.
- 55mm diamter
- 27mm width
- 55 grams
- 2.8mm gap width
- 8mm axle
- 8x 2mm response holes
- One piece fixed axle construction
- Beat Blasted
It’s designed with high walls near the axle for stalls that open up to a wider butterfly shape. It has a little 8mm indented “bubble” at the axle for pulls starts. My favorite feature though is it’s big rounded cozy rims which let me play with it like a worry stone.
Pictures:
Fresh out of the shipping box
Cleaned up in natural lighting
The Future
Now that I have them in hand and confirmed that I do in fact love them, and that they haven’t fallen apart or melted during play what are the plans?
First stop. I’ll be putting together a PIF, probably the week after next. I’ll put forward two of the three protos in two separate boxes so it can go out to a couple people at once.
As far as production runs go. I have a few options but I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.
- Full production run. I have heard that often yoyo companies will do a run of 300, but I’m not sure there is a current market for that many fixies. If I do a run of 100, I could lower what it costs me to probably $25 per unit give or take.
- I could also do a kind of group buy, have folks sign up and prepay a certain amount, lets say $40, and the remaining balance would depend on how many people signed up, if only a couple signed up the deposit would be half. If a ton of people signed up the deposit would cover the entire cost.
- There might be other in between options I haven’t thought of yet.
Challenges
- Taxes? Honestly I’m more worried about having to hire an account for taxes than I am about trying to make a profit. I don’t want to accidentally make a profit and get audited lol.
- My disability. The yo-yos arrived super filthy with dust from being bead blasted and had to get scrubbed up before use, strung up, and tested. Doing that with 3 was fine but with my physical limitations I’m realizing that doing that 300 times isn’t feasible. I might be able to do 100 over a few weeks if I rope my kids in to help clean them. It’s a challenge that’s on my mind.
still totally fine.
much less yoyo ones.