Hi just wanted to ask is the throwback skill toys (yyt) vip bearing any good?
Specifically is it as smooth or quiet as a dif-e-yo koncave or yyr double straight?
I only ask because they can be bought in bulk for considerably cheaper
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The one I had put in my DV888 was awesome!
I gave it to my nephew for Christmas tho, so I can only go off memory, but it was super smooth and quiet!
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Thanks v much for the reply
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theyre great bearings but know, unlike the concave ones you mentioned, vipâs are grooved iirc
Yeah they are a somewhat unique bearing shape, I had forgotten that!
Also for what itâs worth, modern yo-yos sells a bulk pack of hand test quality bearings at very good prices. I havenât tried them yet, but I listen to Rossâ podcast so I have heard about them a bunch lol
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Iâve tried modern yoyo bearings and every one was dead smooth
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I canât speak to the other bearings you mentioned - havenât tried them. I can say the VIP Bearings have made noticeable differences in the budget friendly throws Iâve put them in. I donât know if I would buy one specifically to toss in a more high end throw but maybe Iâd try it to see how it went.
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The one I have is good enough for sure like smooth and quiet with lube but not that rare blessed by the gods of bearings quiet without lube. I checked all my bearings recently and most are at the same good enough level. Only a few random ones hit that eerily silent and smooth threshold.
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I have the Civility that comes with ViP bearing and its very good. Smooth and quiet. And i also have the $20 NSK bearing which is also very good and smooth and i really canât tell the difference if i am just throwing the Yoyo.
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man i actually dont like the couple i have like this lol Iâm thankful when they start making a little noise. i donât want them screaming at me, but i do enjoy that gentle hiss. also itâs easier for me to tell how much spin i have left when i can hear it
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Same my Yyfr tiny came so smooth it was odd and I find it strange and undesirable
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i been interested in these bearings for a while but theyâre only available in packs of 10 and iâm not spending $100+ on a trial run of a new bearing
if youre interested in grooved, i dont think you can beat an mfd tasmanian tornado impo
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I bought singles and 3 packs on YoTricks a few times. Are you checking for the drop down?
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Iâve been pondering these. Good to know.
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i should qualify that and say i personally have come to prefer concave to grooved. the drawback to grooved bearings is the more string you layer in during tricks, the more snaggy it gets because of the way the string layers next to itself. if itâs grooved it locks in and essentially the loop cant push out of the way of itself. with concaves and flats the string is free to shift on the bearing and accomodate wraps better. feel preference, as always, but i felt it worth mentioning. but if you DO want the stability of a grooved thats where id go mfd impo
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Whatâs your preferred concave?
g2 ripper is prob my fav ive tried but theyâre out of stock atm. maybe @G2_Jake can comment on restock. honestly Iâve come to love and appreciate od 10 ball flats. you have to play more cleanly than with others, but if you stick with it, i think ppl can come to appreciate what they can offer. it can clean up play and also just feels the least restrictive. plus they just spin for days and look and feel very premium 
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WARNING; (very long explanation regarding outer bearing shapes. To those that might be willing to entertain expanding their view considering the subject, you will find the read useful. For that small group of folks that already know everything and donât care or like anything I say, it will just be a Wall of Words and they will let me know they refuse to accept any information that canât be solved in 100 words or less)
Oh wellâŚ
Thomas definitely makes a good points about the potential disadvantages of a grooved bearing.
I remember for many many years, my personal feeling was that the primary advantage of a grooved bearing was assisting the people that were going for a world yo-yo sleeping records, to assist in keeping the string From touching the walls of the yo-yo and creating drag. And it obviously worked pretty well way back when.
Before I continue with my unsolicited bearing shape explanation, just an envision that youâre looking Into the gap of a yo-yo that has a string attached around the bearing.
It can almost go without saying that the higher the yo-yo player skill level, the less the shape of the bearing matters. The higher level players have such amazing string, gap alignment, and abilities, and corrective stability skills⌠It really doesnât matter.
That doesnât mean that the majority of people that throw yo-yos canât get some inexpensive power ups out of having something other than a flat bearing.
So here we go⌠You have a flat bearing and you throw down a powerful sleeper, and you got eagle vision to the point where you can stare down in the gap from about 4 feet away, regardless of the lighting conditions. As a yo-yo hits the bottom of the string, You are gonna see one of three things.1. The string is going to be to the left of center in the gap⌠2. The string is going to be to the right of center in the gap. 3. The string is gonna be somewhere around the middle of the gap.
So now with this awareness, you do a bin return and you get ready to throw a breakaway. You throw powerful break away and just immediately start going into your combos. You keep a keen eye on your string tension in an effort to keep it close to neutral. As you were dropping string segments into the gap, a slightly loose loop tension at the bearing to neutral tension at the bearing will allow the string to slide, whichever direction it needs to slide in order to accommodate the String layers you are putting into the gap. You move fast. You keep your string app alignment as close to perfect as possible. And a flat bearing will serve you well.
Interestingly, One Drop Figured this out years ago. And that is why to this day their yo-yos come stock with a 10 ball flat bearing of reasonably good quality.
Now letâs move to a yo-yo factory not flat bearing. The yo-yo factory option provides a fairly flat center section that comprises 60 to possibly 70 something percent of the total width of the bearing. As your eyes follow the surface of the bearing to the edge of the gap, there is a slight angular ramp up, which assist in keeping a string that migrates to the side From making full contact With the wall of the yo-yo response or wall of the yo-yo itself in creating drag. Obviously, the design Of the yo-yo factory bearing, they call the center track, has proven its value to many and that is why itâs pretty much a standard feature on yo-yo factory yo-yos.
Now letâs move to the concave area like the late Frank Difeo sold. The KonKave bearing basically has a smooth center low point and then moving away from the centerpoint migrate at a slightly upward curve until it gets to the edge of the gap. The idea obviously being that on the throwdown, the string will migrate down and find the center for optimal initial spin power. And that is a good thing with a few caveats. Or at least one that stands out if you wanna get technical. Letâs see youâre using a genuine smooth outer race KonKave bearing. You throw a powerful break away into just a basic double or nothing. The string is pretty much centered at that point. When you move into tricks that require a lot of string layering, if you string tension is slightly loose or at least neutral but no more the string will more easily move from side to side as you put segments Into the gap. But technically speaking, you have to take into consideration that if your strength tension causes a loop at the bearing to be a little on the grippy side, as youâre layering into the gap, the string actually has to move slightly uphill from the center area because the loop is trying to hold on to that centerpoint. I know that may be a little technical. But itâs a technical reality I personally have no way to measure exactly how much efficiency you lose by using a concrete bearing? But when Hans and Ben came up with the center trac, One of their points of reasoning was that it provided potentially a better balance of performance because you would have the center area where the string loop could move freely or I should say more freely from side to side, but at the same time create less resistance, but not having that curve that the string has to climb up, Especially if your strings kind of wound tight.
Now we come to the faceted bearing. Basically, essentially a concave bearing, but throwing some extra steps on the way uphill to get around what was originally considered the pattern on the shape of the concave bearing. By putting extra facets in the outer race, it was somewhat supposedly easier to explain that the bearings people were producing were providing KonKave Type performance without actually being copycat, concave bearings, lol
⌠there isnât any real compelling scientific proof that a faceted concave shape is any more functional than a curve of a standard concave bearing. If youâre doing some fast complicated combos with a lot of string layering going on, a faceted con bearing is just gonna create more than a standard smooth concave shape simply because each little step is something the string literally has to climb over.
If I can give you an abstract example that you might be able to wrap your head around think of this⌠You were in a skateboard park. Youâre right in the middle of a big deep bowl. You push away from the center as fast as you can to try to climb up to the rim of the bowl.
⌠letâs see there are two big bowls at the skateboard park. Bowl number one is smooth from the rim down to the center. Bowl number two is faceted from the rim down to the center. So you push off from the center of ball number one to see how high you can get. Then you run over to bowl number two and you push off from the center to see how high you can get.
The smooth bowl, which would represent the smooth KonKave bearing surface, Would allow a lower friction coefficient because your forward motion would not be interrupted by Steps in the bowl as you progress up the sides.
On the other hand, the bowl with the Multi step surface would create much more friction and interference in your forward motion, which would be similar to the little steps in a faceted Concave tight bearing.
Some people will swear at the bearings with the little steps are the best. And I canât prove that theyâre not. But what I can tell you is that the concave bearings that have the little steps in them are usually a higher grade bearing to start with. So itâs kind of a conundrum from a technical viewpoint. Is the bearing a better bearing because it has a little Steps in the concave surface? Where is the bearing a better spinning bearing because maybe itâs made with a higher level of precision and itâs the efficiency of the bearing construction itself, that just makes you âthinkâ the multi-faceted outer race is the reason?
NowâŚ. The real puzzle. The grooved bearing. If you keep your String tension anything tighter than neutral, your string will be effectively hugging that center groove and dividing your affect the string gap into two sections. The one on the left of the string loop and the one to the right on the string loop. That can be good and that can be bad depending on your point of view and your mission at hand.
If the strings you were doing require less string, layering, and more spend time without constant regens, A grooved bearing Can be almost magical. Because you know and have confidence that the string is gonna stay in the middle and make your trick mission just that much easier for you.
On the other hand, if you do some complex trick combos that require many string layers in the gap, that grip that the loop can have in that groove is going to end up costing you more drag and spend time simply because the strings may possibly keep landing on one side of center And essentially making your gap seem that much smaller.
Obviously, that point can be discussed for either realm of possibility or realm of probability factors of where the string is gonna land? Because I personally have no way of gauging depending on what tricks youâre doing if the strings that fall into the gap are gonna stay on one side or maybe ideally by a miracle theyâll just go from side to side and not be bothered by the string thatâs tethered in the center of the gap because itâs stuck in a groove. Because when you have a string, thatâs got a little grip on that groove, the chances of it migrating uphill to make way for layers of string that just happened to fall into one side of the gap is going to be literally an uphill battle. When a string has a snug grip on the center groove bearing, it can be very stubborn about wanting to climb uphill and get out of the way.
In summoning up my little oratory, I would just like to say that all the bearings I have discussed have advantages and disadvantages. And I think more often than not people that get locked in to a certain type of bearing donât even realize that they may more than anything else have just adapted like humans do to the equipment that theyâre using.
Once they adapt to a certain bearing outer race shape, they will primarily identify the advantages because theyâve already adapted to what would be considered disadvantages, like with a grooved bearing.
People will swear by a certain bearing. Whether itâs a center groove, or a V shape that results in a groove, or a faceted version of a concave, or a concave itself, or center trac Or straight out flat bearing⌠Every bearing type will have some people that say they prefer specifically one of all the ones theyâve tried. And thereâs nothing wrong with that.
Follow this forum long enough and you see a variety of which bearing is best. I prefer the NSK or I prefer the. VIP ,or I prefer the original Difeo KK, or center trac All the wayâŚor the MFD cracked the code, of dead Flat for simplicity, or a One Drop 10 ball is the only option, or 20 other optionsâŚ.
The good news is that especially when you get into the more Expensive yo-yos, the bearing is not that much of a financial challenge to swap out.
This is my partial mindset when I buy⌠let say, a $300+ yo-yo. Instead of getting the expensive yo-yo that might come with a bearing, I donât like too much and getting upset because I think a yo-yo that expensive should certainly come with an amazing bearing?
I provide myself with a different mindset. I resolve myself to the possibility of getting an expensive yo-yo with a bearing that sucks. And of course if the bearing sucks, I have to replace it. The good news is the yo-yo cost 300 or 400 or $500 but the bearing certainly didnât cost that much. And the expensive yo-yo might be a beautiful and very high-performance potential yo-yo. It just happened to come with a dud of a bearing.
So⌠I got over the major hurdle. I bounced some big bucks for an expensive hype performance yo-yo that possibly came with a funky bearing. So instead of having a cow about the bearing, I just swap out the bearing for another one. And maybe another one etc.
Because the yo-yo seems fine it just needs a higher performance bearing, correct?
Anyway, for those few of you that have read this far I will give you a break before you fall asleep, I will wrap this up.
Hopefully, at least a few of you can Wrap your heads around the logic of what I provided concerning bearing shapes.
Since I have been around long enough to see so many new bearings and Iâve certainly not gonna say I tried them all because I have it. But from my experience, I canât really say that Iâve landed on a single bearing shape or manufacture that makes a perfect bearing?
I have found that sometimes a bearing that I just donât like it all in one yo-yo so I put it off to the side in a little box. And then a month later I get another new yo-yo and the bearing in that sucker eats rocks. So I go and get my little parts box and take out that bearing that I didnât like a month ago and the other yo-yo and I put it in my new yo-yo. And miraculously it plays like a dream in the other yo-yo. I donât know how to explain that except to say that some bearings, even regardless of the outer race shape, theyâll work with a yo-yo or they just donât âJiveâ with it at all.
Throwing yo-yos I have found isnât just a past time. And it isnât just a hobby. And it isnât just a skill toy. Itâs an adventure. And any of you guys and girls just stick around for a while, Come to the realization that one of the coolest things about throwing yo-yos is the actual adventure, resulting from the multitude of tricks and the amazing variety of Yo-yos available to continue the adventure.
Thatâs allâŚ
PS⌠This long story was generated using talk to text. I donât have the time or inclination at the moment, in the middle of the night to go back and spellcheck. So for those few of you that actually are adventurous enough to read this whole reply, If you run into a word or a sentence structure that canât be diagrammed using normal methods, and it appears that English may just be my second language, that would not be the case.
It just seems like the talk to text app has trouble understanding the way I speak?
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Good to go
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