Tips On 3D Printing a Yo-yo?

I just got a 3D printer recently, and after seeing a few people 3D print their own yoyos, I was interested in trying my hand to make a functional printed yoyo when I got a little better! The only problem is that I really didn’t know what I needed to account for on a 3D printed yoyo besides getting metal bearing seats (still kind of confused on how I put them onto a 3D printed yoyo and have them fit). Does anyone have any tips/tricks?

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Never printed a yo-yo myself, however I’m sure you could find some free 3d models on thingiverse.com that you could check out and get an idea of what other people have done. Usually there will be notes from the creator of the model

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Also most of the time the creators want people to print their designs or use them as a starting point for their own designs. And they will usually say what parameters they used for the print such as scale, infill density, layer thickness etc.

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You actually don’t have to use metal bearing seats if you don’t want to. You can just 3d print them inside the yoyo itself. You’ll most likely want to print at 100% infill or at least really high for weight. For attaching each half you can use a bolt system or just thread a screw in (this probably will strip eventually though).

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Lots of good info on the Let’s talk 3D printing thread. What printer did you get?

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A fun starting point you can print Jeffrey pangs fluid yo-yos and buy his kit from yye for the guts and stuff.

Lots of models on thingiverse. Layerinfinity has a bunch of neat free stl files for caps and rims and stuff and you can buy the stl files for one of his yo-yos.

Lots of starting points then you can tinker from there.

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YJYoyo released a design here a bit ago:

would highly recommend at looking at their stuff, probably the most pronounced 3d printed yoyos at the moment

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I’ve seen quite a few yoyos there I like, might give printing one a try!

Got myself a VoxelLab Aquila as a hand me down, and it’s been working pretty well!

Tempted to buy a size D bearing JUST to print this yo-yo!

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