Air resistance is trivial?? Don’t tell any physicists.
Somebody explain to me why the Draupnir is both floaty and super stable if float/stability are opposite ends of a spectrum. The Draupnir’s weight is concentrated massively on the edges. It shouldnt’ be floaty by this conception of floatiness.
Maybe the problem is just the word is so poorly defined that people use it in a lot of different senses? I don’t know. It’s certainly a vague term, open to all kinds of interpretation.
It’s because of its lightweight. Float can come from center-weight and the overall weight of the yoyo. Yes, lots of rim weight on the rims of the Draupnir but it is only 63 grams after all…
The summit is floaty, at 67(?) grams it’s not lightweight. But there’s some center weight in there that makes itfloaty
andy’s got it right. The Draupnir is light and not dense (ie. the same weight in a micro yoyo would not feel floaty).
It’s not about air resistance, sorry. Not at the trivial levels we’re talking about with similarly-shaped yoyos.
“Float” has far more to do with weight than people give it credit for. It has more to do with how the yoyo hits the end of the string than people realize. And it certainly has more to do with weight distribution than air resistance.
The draupnir is floaty because the the overall weight of the yoyo is lower than the average throw. I also know that the draupnir has a very thin frame. There’s not a whole lot of material anywhere on the yoyo. This thin build plays a pretty big part in how it feels and performs.
How would weight have anything to do with it. A light object falls just as fast as a heavy one. Could someone explain this to me. Or is this more of a feeling and less actual substance. I’m confused.
Yeah, Andy has the right idea. The biggest part of weight distribution is indeed the weight(total). And I made an illustration of how a yoyo can be both floaty and stable which I hoped would give a visualization of how a yoyo can be a bit of both.
Consider this shai, you have a room and you are furnishing it. A completely empty room would be a completely floaty yoyo with no stability and having things stacked to the roof all over would be extreme stability. Now you put a couple of couches and furnish the room to your desires then there is as much occupied space(stability) and open areas(float) as you like while still having both. I hope this helps you grasp the concept.
It’s not about falling, it’s about lifting or pulling the yoyo up.
In regards to air resistance, your yoyo isn’t going to reach close to terminal velocity by dropping your strings length. Air resistance applies more to speed of the yoyo, where you are pushing the yoyo to its speed limit. If your yoyo has enough air resistance to fall noticeably slower it would play at a very noticeable slow speed. And since I brought up speed, the total weight of the yoyo has a lot more influence on the speed than any other aspect.
As we’ve stated many times before, float is the sensation that is given by the ease of lifting the yoyo. It is obviously easier to pick up a lighter object than a heavier one is it not? You are right in that all things fall at the same speed. However, we are not talking about how the weight affects hang time because it does not. It affects how easy it is to pop the yoyo up.
Based on what I’ve seen, float is the word that yoyoers have attributed to hang time; how long a yoyo stays in the air when you pop it up, but everything will fall at the same speed, as you have stated. So float probably isn’t a good word for it. The thing is, we are talking about how easily a yoyo responds to us pulling or popping it up, but responsiveness is already a term used for rolling the yoyo back up.
So I guess here’s where I’m still stuck: why would putting the weight towards the center of the yoyo result in a floatier feel? Seems like no matter where the weight is, the way the yoyo hits the end of the string is going to be the same. I understand the light vs heavy thing, but when two yoyos are the same weight, but one is more rim-weighted, what makes the less rim-weighted yoyo feel floatier? (If that’s indeed what causes things to feel floaty)
I haven’t looked into that actually, but it has to do with rotational physics
Yeah it has to do with aerodynamics a lot more than weight. Objects of the same shape fall at the same speed regardless of mass, assuming they are stiff enough not to bend under the force of drag (which we can safely assume for yo-yos).
I browsed through a bunch of topics on float on these forums and picked out the yoyos that were mentioned the most, along with others labeled as floaty by reputable/experienced forum members. I then sat down and examined their stats.
In order (By Diameter)
Spyy Punchline - 52.5mm/65g
YYR Acrophobia - 54mm/66g
CLYW Puffin - 54.43mm/65.8g
CLYW Bonfire - 55mm/65.5g
CLxOD Summit - 55.5mm/66.75g
G2 Albatross - 56mm/64.4g
Gen-Yo Model 10 - 56.13mm/66g
CLYW Chief - 56.52mm/65.5g (just focusing on 1 run here)
CLYW Cliff - 59.4mm/67.7g
YYR Overdrive - 59.5mm/65.5g
Werrd Sentinel - 61.8mm/67.8g
Only 1 of these throws is under 65g, which shows that weight in itself is not the deciding factor here.
The size of these range from 52.5mm to 61.8mm, showing that size in itself is not the cause either. That being said you don’t hear of many floaty undersized yoyos, and undersized yoyos always tend to feel more solid to me. It tends to be the full sized ones that are credited with float for the most part.
Take for instance me little ILYY St Eel:
42.10mm/61.50g
Which feels like a mini brick on a string, despite being very light.
Weight placement, likewise cannot be given full credit. A center weighted throw thats 53mm but weighs 69g will not be floaty. On the flipside, the YYR Draupnir is heavily rim weighted, yet plays very light due to it only weighing 63.5g.
Again, the YYR Overdrive has a rim weighted design, however plays incredibly light. The YYF Proton has the same Weight x Diameter ratio as a Puffin, but since it’s all rim weight, it plays more solid.
Jason Wong proposed that it was the perceived lightness of a larger throw. When you throw something as big as the Cliff your mind expects it to be heavier than your smaller yoyos, so when it plays lighter than it feels like it should based on it’s size, then you have this perceived float. I definately think this is a pretty good explanation for some of the sensation surrounding the Cliff/Overdrive etc. I think though that there’s a little more that goes into it concerning all sized throws… which brings me to…
The conclusion I have drawn from examining all this data when I should be working:
So what is?
…
All of the above! Design is what makes a yoyo floaty. A combination between a low “Weight x Diameter” ratio and careful weight placement.
All 3 must be in the right place, at the right time, and that’s where the magic happens.
That being said, it’s all very subjective, so maybe float just doesn’t exist. 
TL;DR/CLIFFS!
Shai, for the nth time, float isn’t really how fast something falls, because, as you said, all objects will fall at the same rate as long as they don’t bend under the force of drag. Aerodynamics isn’t a large enough factor to affect something so prominent as float. It might affect it a little bit, however I doubt that you will ever feel the difference. Try this, if you had a ball of silly putty and dropped it and recorded the time as precisely as you could, you would get pretty much the same time if you dropped the same putty as a cube or a disk or a tube. Do you think you can make out the very slight changes in falling times between the shapes? I sure can’t.
Gambit, thanks for taking the time to run that. I tend to agree with your conclusions, except that we have to consider breadth of experience.
The reason some people might think the Punch Line is “floatier” than many options could be that they haven’t played everrthang (none of us has!). I used to think the Punch Line was one of the giants of float… and it’s still on the floaty side for me. But it’s nothing on the Smooth Move, for example, which is about a gram lighter and is has a different weight distribution. And neither of these even come close to the Pacquiao, which is a wee 49g.
If the Cliff is the floatiest thing you’ve played, it might just be that you’ve never played an H5xChief. And even if you have, that experience of “whoah, the feel of this this is so unique!” from the initial impressions of the Cliff are pretty firmly lodged into the brain, and those impressions inform our perceptions in devious ways.
TL;DR … trying to codify “float” is an exercise in bullcruddery! I still do it, but I know how futile it is even when I’m doing it. 
Funnily enough, it was your plugging of the Punchline in Jason’s old thread that made me include it, haha. Although it was a bit of a mould breaker so I guess your review of it’s floatiness gives further credence to the weight x diam principle.
I agree though, unless you’ve really tried everything it’s hard to really pick out the extent of ‘float’ that something has. It seems that the most unanimously voted “King of Float” was the General Yo Model 10 though.
True that! At least it gives us all something to discuss besides the normal “whats your favourite yoyo” stuff though. Where’s a world-class Physicist when you need one eh?
You’d think someone would’ve come forth with a concrete explanation by now. :
How can there be a concrete explanation of a subjective thing?
I think people would be surprised at how little their perception lines up with concrete facts. If we can’t even agree that the Model 10 is the ultimate full-sized float machine (we don’t… I for one did not find it particularly remarkable in the float department) then we can’t agree what creates the perceived sensation.
In other words, it’s mostly in our heads.
The way a yoyo hits the end of the string is incredibly important. If it unwinds gracefully, it will not “thunk” and you will also not have a lot of directional speed… this will probably cause you to play a little more lightly and gracefully.
If it screams to the end of the string with lots of directional momentum, you might have the incredible urge to play hard and fast.
The way you play will definitely affect whether you think of it as “floaty” or not.
I agree with you Greg. I wasn’t blown away by floatiness of the M10 like I was led to believe. The Cliff still wins in that department, for me. I didn’t even really notice it with the H5xChief…
You may be right, but yo-yos aren’t just falling bodies so the dynamics are substantially more complicated. They have vast rotational inertia, and when playing with a yo-yo you don’t just drop it, you apply acceleration (primarily centripetal) in various directions through manipulation of the string. I’m not saying you’re wrong but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss aerodynamics here.
Anyway, that response you quoted was not meant to argue the aerodynamics of “float” so much as to affirm Pineapple Jumpsuit’s (correct) belief that fall speed is not determined by mass.
Ultimately I agree with GregP and MiamiBuddha. “Float” is so vaguely defined that it’s inherently subjective and will have different meanings to different people. To me it means a feeling of lightness as the yo-yo moves both through the air and on the string, and to others it means something about the weight distribution. I don’t think anyone is wrong here, but it is bothersome that the term “floaty” is used so much when a concrete definition cannot be agreed upon, as this makes the term confusing at best and meaningless at worst.
Sorry kids, there’s little if any aerodynamics involved with yoyos. A brick on a string has as much aerodynamics as a yoyo. It’s all rotational dynamics.
(I have a masters degree in science!!! ;))