Again, it’s not even necessary to go there. I have been using my nylon poly blend for well over a year and a half, and I can feel a night and day difference when performing slacks and whips. Again, I’m kind of spoiled to my own blend.
When I perform a simple Hidemasa hook for example. My recipe retains a tremendous amount of energy with the flick of my wrist, whereas let’s say a kitty fat I have to force the whip so much harder than I normally would with my own recipe.
The trade-off is that my strings feel a little coarser. I understand that that is not a desirable trait, but I personally don’t mind the texture of them because the performance that they offer is so incredibly worth it to me. They handle finesse and instruction very well, whereas let’s say a kitty fat seems to be a little bit more sassy.
But then again, people have been doing all kinds of crazy slacky whippy stuff with poly strings for longer than I’ve been throwing. All the power to them. I just can’t get into them
I spin my own on a homemade string rig. I get my polyester string from ThreadArt. It is awesome, and I can make my own colors too. Here are a couple I made.
@zslane. Good question. They aren’t being phased out. The demand for YYSL and the available time to produce all the formulas result in sold out colors between restocks. We are producing all of the time but usually working on one or two formulas before moving on to the next. We just finished up a restock of Ammo and are now doing Venom, Type X, and a few key Plutonium colors that are moving quickly.
I’ve tried to like nylon but the half dozen or so varieties I’ve tried are difficult for me to work with. For me, it is so different from poly that I end up having to adjust my play style and I don’t like that. Like with whips, for example, I consistently “over-whip” with nylon, if that makes sense to anyone. It just flies all over the place and carries so much momentum that even after the string hits the target, it wants to keep going. Then there’s the feel. As people have mentioned they all feel rough to me. I haven’t tried the ones @andy569 has mentioned, but I do keep trying nylon on occasion. I will say that it does last a good amount of time though, and sometimes it will kind of break in and start to feel better, but that process takes a good amount of time
Yeah this is the other thing that bugs me. Nylon can be so “durable” that it takes a whole day (or more) to break it in. That’s another downside of durability for me. I don’t want to commit to playing hours with a string to get it in comfortable shape.
The soft nylon varieties are nicer on the hand but feel so weird to me in play.
Anyways, my answer to a lot of this is “own more yo-yos” then you’ll go through strings less quickly because you’ll be amortizing all the wear time across (X) throws
@codinghorror This all kind of reminds me of the whole Apple versus Microsoft debate. They both work just fine for what they are, but they are extremely different from one another. It’s all up to preference really.
I would say most people prefer poly over nylon and that’s because they just like the feel of poly better (maybe because they’ve gotten too used to it and don’t like change) and that’s completely fine.
Objectively though, I feel like wooly nylon really does at least “perform” better than poly in every way. Does poly whip better than nylon? No. Hold tension better? Not really. Slacks? Nope. More durable? Definitely not. Good nylon is easier on the hands than any poly I’ve ever tried too.
Feel is the only downside I ever hear people say about wooly nylon. And I feel like if you play with nylon for a bit you’ll get used to them just like you get used to poly anyway.
This is where I disagree; I think those observations are, in fact, preference. If these were absolute facts as you maintain, would any high level competitors even use poly strings today? Wouldn’t they all use nylon blends because they “perform better” with nylon?
Poly replaced cotton because it was better than cotton in every way. That’s unfortunately not true of nylon.
I like the YYSL Type X (feels good on my fingers, lasts a long time). I guess I use a string until it is completely dead (or knotted so bad I just give up). I buy these in bulk. When I play wood axle fixies, I use either the Type 10 from YYE, or, I make my own cotton strings (thickness depends on the yoyo I’m making them for). While I like making string, it isn’t a money saver. I found a nice cotton thread, but, buying it at retail means I’m paying about $0.48 for materials per string. Yes, they last awhile, but, when the 100 count Type 10 cotton is $10.99 here, and, they work just fine (and are more consistent than my homemade), I make my string for the sense of accomplishment and joy of using something I created with my own two hands (and a drill).
Nylon does whip better and does last longer. Those are preference, you’re right, but they’re facts too. But anyway, poly replaced cotton because poly won’t snap on you with 30 minutes of play.
The added benefits of nylon string like the extra durability and whippiness isn’t completely necessary. In the grand scheme of things the string you use isn’t really that important.
Why do most competition players use kitty string? They’re not using it because they’re the best strings, they use it because they’re cheap, it’s what they’ve always used, and string isn’t important enough to many of them to change what they use or even try different strings. Frankly, I bet a lot of them don’t even care what string they use either. String is string, they’ll make whatever they have work.
But what if you could get wooly nylon 100 packs for $15? Better yet, what if people started using these before poly and poly was the more expensive material? People would be used to the feel of nylon and find poly to feel weird and too rough. If the tables had turned like that I don’t think anybody would be using poly, they’d be considered a weird material that nobody uses like rayon or silk.
I think the 2 biggest things holding nylon back is the price and the fact that everyone is used to the feel of poly already.
It can whip faster, but that isn’t always better. There are types of tricks where you want loops to stay open longer and not zip through the air, otherwise you can never catch it where you want it. On the other hand, I personally have trouble with a lot of hook tricks without using a really fast string… so I normally learn new hooks with a really zippy string, then work my way back to a bulk string, eventually. Similar to how I use a really heavy, stable yoyo to learn new tricks on.
The durability of 100% woolly nylon is also a big consideration for me, since making strings is time consuming. If all my hand-made strings wore out in <4 hours I’d be exhausted from having to make more.
By the way, if anyone is using woolly nylon in a string recipe, but they want it to not feel so slick - blend in 1-2 wraps of spun polyester (not tri-lobal) and a lot of that slick feel will simply vanish.
I guess im am in the Nylon camp. Blends are nice most of the time, but i just can’t handle most full poly anymore. It just feels, almost, wrong. The way it feels as it slides in between my fingers gives me, what i would consider to be the tactile equivalent, of nails on a chalkboard.
I can use them, but 100% poly string distracts and degrades my experience. Im happy there are choices, and even happier I started making my own to dial down exactly what I was looking for. Now that I found it? I no longer think about it really. Till threads like this comes up and make me think about how it all came to this.
I can’t help but laugh looking back at how much money I spent on buying different brands/types/thickness strings in my search of what I was looking for. Its all about basis of comparison, and being able to obtain that was worth it. The downside is that I have a HUGE amount of random store bought and home made strings that will never be used. Im mean Ive got a drawer full! haha
I’ll just flat out say I find the nylon obsession… weird. If all the yo-yo companies believed it was that much better, they’d ship their yo-yos with it.
I am in no way anti-Nylon, but the way it gets presented as “Nylon or death!” is… bizarre.
nah, its simply a preference. Like ice cream flavors, after trying most of them, i found i enjoy one kind the most. This thread was about what strings we use, and nylon seems to have spoiled me as well.
I LOVE ice cream, and made it for about 3 years on a coastal island and had full reign of flavor creation and recipe tweaking. I made them all over the years and some very unconventional. After it all, hand me a rum raisin and ill find myself in a far less enjoyable experience than say, if someone handed me a nice peach vs the experience being top notch.
That is not saying “Peach ice cream or death”, its only my preferred flavor. Its all ice cream, and its all yuumy.
Ill use any strings if i have no choice for the sake of yoyo. If i can choose tho, ill reach for nylons first. and blends of i want to spice things up. Ill leave the full polys on the table for others to enjoy. Like veggies. Yall can have those too haha
Well, I mean I’m not going to pity poly strings just because they’re the industry standard, if that’s what you mean. Nylon outperforms in outlasts poly by a landslide. But it affects me not one bit that polly is the industry standard. I have not lost a single second of sleep over this matter. Lol
I ended up learning how to make my own string that I ended up marketing for a while. While I am not able to continue to produce like I wanted to when I started the project, I do still quietly make them in the background, mostly for personal use, some for special orders that happen behind the scenes, or other fun projects I cannot talk about yet
I call them HeartStrings, but its really just a prideful product that I developed over countless blend/combo/materials/tightness/etc variables, and solid feedback from alot of helpful testers. My favorites at the end of the day is a blend of nylons. I call them “The White” and I do think it’s worthy of being on the market. I just don’t have enough time off work to spin them enough to keep the website up and able to keep stock built.
It is sort of an open question why nylon strings haven’t come to dominate the commercial string yo-yo string market if they are so vastly superior, and all?
Possible that cost is the issue? Still, I can’t imagine that a spool of nylon thread is really that much more expensive than a spool of polyester thread?
Comparing prices on thethreadexchange.com, I see:
Polyester - Size 46 - White (A&E 30001)- Bonded - Nominal 4 Oz Spool - 2500 Yards $11.75
Nylon - Size 46 - White (A&E 30001) - Bonded - Nominal 4 Oz Spool - 2500 Yards $12.50
That is a six percent difference in price, so IDK
Also on YYE website, 10 pack of kitty fat poly is $3.50, whereas 10 pack of kitty fat nylon is… wait for it… $3.50. And both 100 packs are also the exact same price, $18.99.
