The BOWL MINI Releases 7/24 @ 8PM!

YoYoExpert Releases and Restocks
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Hi guys! Elvin here and I made the Bowl Mini.

I just wanted to share the concepts behind the yo-yo design and the artwork.

The yo-yo design is an evolution of the Bowl shape., which started with the titanium Bowl and followed with the Bowl 7068.

I have always been a fan of undersized yo-yos. The OG Wooly Marmot, with its 50mm diameter, remains one of my favorite yo-yos to date. This was why I decided on the 50mm diameter for the Bowl Mini. It might not be much smaller than the bigger Bowls (56mm) if you compare the numbers, but in “yo-yo terms” 6 mm is a lot! In general I feel the market for sub 50mm yoyos is very small. 50mm is the lowest limit. There are some exceptions, like the 66% range which are also for a very niche market.

There are very few steel yo-yos in the market and when the machinist told me he was able to make a steel yo-yo with extremely thin rims confidently, I jumped on it!

Nothing in the market today, except for TOPYO’s steel model, has rims as thin as the Bowl Mini. Note that this machinist is a different one from the one used by TOPYO. The steel yo-yos of the past are also very small because people couldn’t machine steel thin enough - the ILYY St Eel, Yoyoempire Cloudfly are some examples. Making a steel yo-yo above 50mm is new!

I initially wanted to make the Bowl Mini in titanium, but figured it would be too expensive for an undersized yo-yo. Steel was a good “middle ground” price point between aluminium and titanium.

Most importantly, why I chose steel, was that I also wanted to shrink the yo-yo down proportionately. I didn’t want to do a “Grail → Quail → Sparrow” - the rims got progressively thicker for these models and the eventual yo-yo looked quite different from its bigger counterpart. To give an illusion of a true “mini”, the higher density of steel really helped - there is much more weight per unit area for the Bowl Mini, but the yo-yo actually looks like it shrunk proportionately. The weight distribution was kept exactly the same.

For the artwork, I took inspiration from the custom artwork on CLYW’s Hania Bonfire which I own. The CLYW artwork by Jason Week was a tribute to Nuu’s newly born child and features what looks like a baby goat sucking on a pacifier. My son was born about 5 months ago and he looks like a mini version of me, hence I decided to put him on the box art (that is him on the box!). I decided to put him in the Bowl Mini bath tub because his bath time is when I spend most time with him - I usually bathe him in the evenings when I come home from work.

The rest of the artwork sort of progressed from the baby / mini concept - the little tikes enamel pin with the yoyo bearings and axles as its wheels, the milk bottle yo-yo lube, the birth certificate with the yo-yo specs etc. The process of brainstorming these with my artist was really fun and rewarding.

I hope those of you who bought the Bowl Mini are loving it! A lot of thought and effort was put into it, as I wanted all my releases to have a theme / story. Nowadays, most yo-yos look the same and I feel what differentiates one from another is their story.

Thank you for listening! :slight_smile:

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These are some higher resolution images of the box which shows all the yo-yo elements I was talking about!

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Bowl%20Mini%20Enamel%20Pin
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This was my very first sketch for the artist. As you can see, the final artwork turned out to be very similar :joy:. It usually takes a lot of back and forth with the artist to get the proportions and yo-yo elements just right!

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Elvin didn’t say it was a Mini.

He means it’s a mini compared to the regular size Bowl.

Simple misinterpretation of what he meant.

It happens to be an amazingly good yoyo.

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The aesthetics for this are incredible, thanks for sharing the story behind this one!

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I have to admit the packaging for the Bowl was very amusing, even though I was skeptical. So thumbs up for that :+1:

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I stepped over the word ‘enough’.
Is there a necessity to machine steel so thin? I wanted the Eel to have majestic power which is why I went for traditional rim to diameter ratios. That meant the yoyo needed to be a mini/micro. Sure, you can machine steel a lot thinner, but you will end up with a completely different end product, which was not what we were after at the time the Eel was designed.

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Right. I always assumed the St. Eel was designed to be a mini yoyo, not that it had to be made small due to limitations of material.

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I think many people might be mistaken by the “thin” rims on the Mini. There is actually a lot of weight there. The body is even thinner as you progress into the bearing seat. The bearing seat is also paper thin. For the Bowl Mini, machining the body thinly was a necessity as I wanted to preserve the Bowl aesthetics and also keep the same weight distribution. I tried to match the rim to body thickness ratio to the previous Bowls.

Titanium is about 55-60% the density of steel. The rim on the Bowl Mini is 0.9 mm, equivalent to the weight of a 1.5 mm thick rim for titanium. Comparatively, the full sized titanium Bowl has a rim thickness of 1.1 mm if I remember correctly!

This brings me to a point that “rim to diameter ratio” is not as important as the “per unit area weight to diameter ratio”, especially when we are talking about a dense material such as steel. If you want to make a powerful yo-yo, steel is probably not an ideal material to use as you would not get significant weight reduction centrally despite machining it as thinly as 0.5 mm.

But apologies for alleging that the St Eel was made a “micro” because the steel could not be machined thin enough. Now I know that it was deliberate. I take that back!

Is the body on the St Eel very thin compared to the rim? How thin was it at its thinnest? I figure that if you did 0.5 mm for the body centrally, and put all the weight at the rim, it’ll be a rim weighted micro and it’ll have a powerful spin.

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My statement wasn’t quite correct as well. Of course thinner rims are no problem regarding inertia if the mass is set at a larger diameter (inertia is calculated by integrating over the entire volume of the object and summing up mass units times their distance from the spinning reference axis squared).

What I wanted to express was: Keeping the looks of traditional yoyos, you need beefy rims and to achieve this with steel, you need to delve in the micro department.

Here’s a view of the cross section of an Eel (rim):

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Understand now! I actually really want a St Eel but haven’t been able to find one.

Is this Frank or Dom talking? I presume it’s Frank? FYI, the “thing” I was working on that I told you about - it’s going to be ready soon. It’s going to be a hilarious. You could do weight training with it. :stuck_out_tongue: I’ll send you and Dom one each when it’s done.

What’s the progress with the Tea Time? :slight_smile: Looking forward to that as well.

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No, this is Dom.
Can’t wait to see the final ‘thing’, hehe.

Get your cakes ready, it’ll be time for tea soon. :face_with_monocle:

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Have set up my table cloth and gotten some cakes out. Ready for tea time :joy:

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St Eel just came up on the YYE BST

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