Same! Even “small” cutouts can have a surprising effect.. large cutouts, like on classic typical aluminum car rims, make the yo-yo unpleasant to play with ..
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Yep. Its poop-nuggets if you want consistent quality over many units.
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But it’s cool and isn’t that worth it?
Honestly any material can work well if it’s given a decent stable guts. It then comes down to is it cost effective and will there be an audience interested
I like wood in terms of connection with nature, organic materials, the feel, etc.. and probably some woods are more consistent (?) in growth, density, hardness, etc than others? It’s all very interesting!
But if you want very accurate control of the yo-yo design physics, I am sorry, but wood is definitely not your huckleberry.
Wood yo-yos are cool, but.. I would always pick wood sides with a center metal axle / ball bearing, myself.
My son selected this as one of his favorites recently:
(along with a Luftverk Ti responsive, the SB highwall, so there you have it, both are good 
!)
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It talks about physics, and yes uses examples in metal like the sb2 which he designed. All of those materials vary the numbers, but they don’t change the physics. Don is the reason we have modern ball bearing yoyos and why design advanced the way it did.
The same concepts explored in his books still apply to everything we have now, the numbers just get more extreme.
A few years before he died I talked to him about modern yoyos. The main thing he wanted to update was how unresponsive play changed things, specifically the impact on the throw. Even back in ~2006 he talked about how much energy is lost to unresponsive yoyos because of the amount of string slip you get in the throw.
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@theyoyoarchive Do you have Mr. Dons’ Work in the archive?
Not yet!
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Hi kyo! Miss you from TheYo chat days, hope you’re doing well.
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