Tom Kuhn Heirloom Box of six yo-yo history

[codinghorror]

@codinghorror

All this eventually leads to the Turbo Bumble Bee in 1997 and the Cold Fusion, in 1998!

Here’s the 1997 Turbo Bumble Bee!

As you can see, coming from the very good performance of the Pro-Yo II we now have

• replaceable response pad stickers
• metal bearing

And thus begins the dawn of the modern yo-yo!

I don’t know if you can see it in the pic but there was a bit of rust on the outer edge of the bearing. I cleaned it up as best I could with a lightly oiled buffing cloth, then thick lubed the bearing. It plays great, actually.

Now just add some metal to the mix (Cold Fusion, a year later), begin sloooowly widening the yo-yos a tad, and we’re set for the last yo-yo boom around 1999, as you can see here:

Here's what a high end yo-yo collection looked like.. in 2001

This came up on eBay and I thought it was a striking example of what a complete “high end” yo-yo collection would have looked like in the year 2001: [image] Details [yoyo-lot-1] [yoyo-lot-2] [yoyo-lot-3] [yoyo-lot-4] [yoyo-lot-5] [yoyo-lot-6] [yoyo-lot-7] This is quite an impressive collection… for its time. Look how far we’ve come in 18 years!

I don’t think I’m going to bother getting a metal Cold Fusion, since they’re (as far as I know) basically just metal Bumble Bees, and a bit pricey as they are in demand by collectors.