Titanium is stronger than aluminum, but it is also heavier. The extra strength allows you to reduce the thickness of the yoyo while still maintaining the same durability. Also, I hear it makes a ringing noise when it’s spinning. And let’s not forget about Sparking.
As the first person to make a truly playable Titanium yo-yo, I’m going to second what Ben said.
The cost on Ti yo-yos is huge compared to aluminum… the only way the prices have stayed at even a remotely reasonable range is the manufacturers pushing to keep them there. I only sold direct so that I could keep the pricing at $300… OneDrop had the advantage of making them in-house at their own machines, which cut out the outsourcing cost… so they managed to slip it in under $200 selling direct. YYF did just a Ti rimmed yo-yo and it pushed $450 once it hit a store… a full on Ti would have been far more.
The only reason I was able to keep the pricing at $300 for the TiPhiter I and II? Spite mostly. The whole reason for that price point, and a lot of the reason that I made a Ti yoyo to begin with? A year before the TiPhiter came out (almost exactly), YYJ made a Ti yo-yo called the Titan Gold. It was $700 jewelry basically… a Ti body with like 23k gold weight rings… it played -awful- and they only made 10-15 of them. Dale Bell (owner of YYJ) said that it would be -impossible- to make a Ti yoyo under $600 and make any money on it at all… so I set my goal at exactly half that, just because I thought I could. I didn’t have a large profit margin by any means, but they did make a decent profit… though costs have gone up since those days.
If you want Ti in a retail store, you’re looking at $500-600 to be sustainable for production. Every time the yo-yo changes hands, the price goes up… so from machinist to yoyo company, then again to the store, and again to you.
The market won’t support that.
The other issue that makes them expensive which some people forget about… the fact that they’re expensive to begin with. That’s right… they’re expensive because they’re expensive. I’ll explain… at x price point, you can expect x number of sales… this means you can recoup your money and start making a profit after x amount of yo-yos. With increased retail price, you sell less yo-yos because only so many people can afford them… therefor each one has to be more expensive to make up for the lack of sales. So the price goes up simply because it’s high to begin with.
Kyle
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