My son and I just conducted a vibe science experiment!
Ingredients – MagicYoyo N12 Shark’s Honor*, hammer, and concrete.
Before we begin, I’d rate this yoyo 9/10 on the fingernail smoothness test. I’ve felt smoother, but it’s certainly very smooth with no vibe at all.
Phase 1 – light rim damage
We disassembled the yoyo and used the hammer to damage just one single rim, along the outside of the rim.
reassembled and thrown, no change to vibe, still 9/10 smoothness
Phase 2 – medium rim damage
reassembled and thrown, no change to vibe, still 9/10 smoothness
Phase 3 – heavy rim damage
reassembled and thrown, extremely minor change to vibe, mayyyybe 8.5/10 smoothness?
Conclusion
Given my previous testing combining radically different yo-yo halves and experiencing no vibe, adding these experiments leads me to this conclusion – no amount of rim damage or variance in the yo-yo halves alone can really affect vibe.
Bonus testing – throw damage
Since we know extreme rim damage alone doesn’t work … clearly the damage that matters must be around the axle and bearing. To get that kind of damage you have to throw the assembled yo-yo, I think. We tested by taking the same N12 – still 8.5/10 smooth – and throwing it as assembled, with string, into concrete.
My 9 year old son and I both tested this together, so we started with his throws and then mine (stronger, as I am an adult).
- after 5-6 light “oops” throw into concrete → no change to vibe
- after 5-6 medium “oops” throws into concrete → no change to vibe
- after several heavy intentional adult strength throws into concrete … then, and only then, we got to 7/10 on the vibe scale!
In short, the only way we could introduce intentional and meaningful vibe is to literally throw the yo-yo, assembled, as hard as we could at adult strength, into concrete. And to be honest even at 7/10 it was plenty playable! It was vibe you could detect with your fingernail quite easily but it didn’t impact play and was not visible on the string.
Of course, IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, we kept throwing the yo-yo into concrete at heavy adult strength levels until it eventually came apart and we saw a visible bend in the axle. We put it back together and the yo-yo was still playable at that point though I’d rate it at 4/10 on vibe. And I suspect you could possibly fix it up a bit more by putting in a new axle.
It’s kind of shocking to me how resilient this yo-yo was, even when we were trying to break it, that wasn’t nearly as easy to do as I thought it would be. Turns out aluminum yo-yos are pretty tough!
As a result of these experiments I’ve updated the first post @Glenacius_K. It does seem that vibe is 90% the axle and bearing seat. I need to run an experiment to see what weight asymmetry on each half does, but I think metal simply isn’t capable of having as much weight density variance as wood or plastic due to unformity of the material.
* do sharks actually understand the concept of honor though