Meanwhile my CFGT is a @photogeek powder-coated, large SPR’d, hubstacked masterpiece… soooooo I have no need for a Starfire I guess? 
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Very nice!
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Look what just popped up! A gold plated cold fusion. Let’s us know what the specs on this bad boy are after you get it. Starting bid is 250$!
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Finally got a Cold Fusion for a reasonable price… the eBay seller must have been a player back in the day because it included the original tin, a ton of extras, pins and a signed patch… even the original strings!
Will have thoughts later!
Oddly enough this came with lots of stuff …
- original tin
- signed patch (looks like yohans signature to my eye, awesome)
- 2 pins
- 3 wood axles
- 1 brass axle (was installed)
- 2 sets of spacers for bearings
… but no bearing. What bearing size fits this? Per yo-yo wiki size A Duncan?
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Ok some quick thoughts… and a visual comparison of the Cold Fusion with the Confusion.
Get it? Con… fusion… Cold… fusion… 
Some obvious visual stuff first.
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Matte / blast finishes are superior to glossy finishes
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It is clearly wider and more butterfly-ish “gt” – the regular Confusion is almost equivalent to an old school Cold Fusion GT!
Less obvious stuff after playing them both for a bit:
First, the starburst style cork response is surprisingly a bigger negative than you’d think. With a flat narrow bearing, the string is gonna rub against those, and when it does, you get some rhythmic thrumming from the built in surface irregularity. I guess the designers were thinking “hey this is like starburst but more betterer” hence the influence? 
Plus it’s cork, not sure if that matters a whole lot but you do feel the “bumps” of the starburst-esque incursions of metal into the cork in play and it sure doesn’t feel great compared to now standard silicone response pad rings, that’s for sure.
Second, there’s a whooole lot of center weight here.
As you can see
There’s
- a captured metal nut
- brass spacer
- aluminum cap
- aluminum “nipple” protrusion
- big, thick threaded metal axle
All that adds up to much center weight.
So on the whole, I wouldn’t say the Cold Fusion stacks up to modern metal responsives particularly well. I would not go out of your way to get one of these unless you’re super interested in yo-yo history. Oddly enough and perhaps paradoxically, I’d say the plastic Turbo Bumble Bee and GT feel less anachronistic in play, perhaps due to a different weight distribution in plastic… not sure
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Bumble Bee, then the GT, then the ColdFusion counterparts were my main yoyos from 1998-2014. So much love for those yoyos. Still have a pretty large stash of brake pads. The Confusion reminds me more of the GT than the standard.
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I replaced the response pads since the ones that were in there were quite old and it came with extras. I thought maybe the response would improve with new cork pads, but it didn’t. In the process of cleaning the response pad wells, I discovered that wow there are some really INTERESTING machining marks in those response wells! I guess machining that odd pseudo-starburst pattern wasn’t easy, another reason not to do that on future metal yo-yos to keep cost down.
Also it came with the brass fixed axle in it which was surprisingly not bad to the point that I didn’t notice it wasn’t bearing-based. I put in the wood axle and I could definitely tell because the friction was so much higher, sleep time was affected.
Did many people really play the Cold Fusion with the brass or wood axles in it rather than a bearing?
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Not that I remember. I had some plastic GT’s setup with the brass sleeves. But those that had a Fusion or GT I don’t think many used those sleeves, it was all about the bearings.
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