well I’ve never liked small bearings they have always been overly responsive, but I just got a sb VK in the mail, and I want to learn to love it. so tell me why you like your sb throws. give me some pros and cons so o can understand what you feel.
Its preference, if you don’t like it why force your self to like them?
There is much to be gained from exploring, understanding, and mastering unfamiliar territory.
3 Likes
I like small bearings because it feels as though the end of the string is connected to the yoyo closer to its true center core. There’s also less of that aggressive thunk when the yoyo unwinds because the string is unraveling at a slower pace.
I know others disagree, but I feel that they spin faster, and, so long as you keep them in plane, spin longer. I’ve also come to like thinner gaps the more experienced I’ve become - they regen more easily for me, and I feel like I have more control with them for 5a.
The only reason 5a became popular with small bearing is low speed binds. with another object swinging around in addition to the yoyo, more friction is created. A small bearung yoyo can provide very tight binds at low speeds, but sacrifices unresponsiveness and other common elements of 1a. Imo, D bearings are the best of both worlds. 4.5 mm gaps with low speed binds. 
thanks for your responses guys. I think I’ll start using my VK more to appreciate it.
This is just… so wrong I can’t begin to tell you how wrong it is.
Well when your yoyo is unresponsive and you are good at yoyoing, the extra gripyness of the response is no problem to deal with. Doesn’t even effect you.
But you gain in being able to throw less hard to get the same spin time, bind with less string in the loop so you get more wraps for the next throw. A lot of the fancy laceration/whip binds are easier to land.
So in other words no downsides but several up sides. Once you are smooth really small bearing yoyos don’t normally have any inherent down sides, just because of the bearing size. Sometimes the yoyos are made like crap but that is another thing.
I think people might have a negative outlook on small bearings because many of us started on A bearing yoyos like Duncan FHZs or FH2s. I started with a Pocket Change, and I remember thinking the C bearing yoyos would be better because of my difficult experience with an A bearing yoyo. People tend to get stuck on a “Bigger is Better” mentality that simply isn’t true. One of my all time favorite yoyos is the BBYY Wedgie, and it happens to be an A bearing.
I simply can’t stand when people reject small bearing yoyos. It would be okay if they gave them a chance and rejected them from preference, but I recently helped a person decide on a yoyo and they simply decided to reject any A bearing yoyos for apparently no reason. This sort of blind assumtion that A bearings aren’t up to par with C’s annoys me so much…
I will admit that some A bearing yoyos do suck (in my opinion, if that wasn’t previously expressed), but there is no reason to boycott the entire option just becasue of one or two negative (or even neutral) experiences.
I wouldn’t say I hate SBs in fact I really want to love them. My Minus Miked FHZ is SB and it is one of the l33test things I have ever played. But my G.5 is SB and is really getting on my nerves right now. I was playing with it, I removed one pad to make it a lot less responsive, which worked well. Though when I had it apart I realized the bearing had a couple catches in it. So I deshielded it and let it have a lighter fluid bath. I puled it out and blew it dry and spun the sucker, it spun more freely than before but still had a catch so I took a paperclip and tapped gently on each ball in hope to break free any gunk that might have been on or in the runs or the balls themselves. I dunked it again and lightly lubed it, the throw is unresponsive enough to perform whips, slacks, and grinds but has a rather loud buzzsaw sound due to the catch in it, AND it’s spin deteriorates rather quickly, I mean like I have 30 seconds to a minute. I guess the bearing is prolly dead 
3 days of play still it is the same way. Anyhow I said all of that to publicly come to the conclusion that while there are advantages to SBs I feel they are a bit more High Maintenance than LBs. I dunno at this point I think I am just rambling so I am going to cut this before I go a bit off the deep end o.O (gotta hate it when you get interrupted during a complete thought :P)
1 Like
I agree 110%, some of my dead unresponsive throws are A-size bearings. My Mayhem for example, I can pop that up over my head with as much slack in the string as I want and it has never snagged the string without a bind. I’m a big Duncan fan so I love A-size bearings but when it all comes down to it, it is all based on my mood for the day.
sb usually equates to smaller gaps, which promotes more responsive play. this is why i like 'em…
mgodinez
cloudy…
This is the kind of assumption i was talking about. You are having a negative experience with the BEARING, not the yoyo. A bearing is a BEARING. This same exact thing could’ve happened with a C bearing, and you know what? It does! The only difference it I don’t see people having issues with a C bearing and then say they don’t like the yoyo it’s in. Mabye people are just jumping to find a reson to hate what everyone else does?
Low speed binds? You’re kidding, right?
My Gorylla snaps back to the hand as fast as my DV888, G5, and ENEME. And, yes, it’s unresponsize.
I myself have never used an SB (A/B) yoyo. And, TBH, I can’t really tell much of a difference between D and C bearings. I just can’t.
Anyway, it’s all preference. If you don’t like SB, why use them? Unless you really just want to.
That’s what I think on the subject.
I think you mistook my post. I was just complaining about my bearing, yes my SMALL Bearing stating that I feel they are more HIGH Maintenance than a Large bearing. I have no ill feelings toward any other SB, just the one I have in my g.5 considering it is the first small bearing I have actually HAD to try and mess with. Sure, it could be that I messed it up, but that would be pretty odd considering I have never had these problems with any of my LBs. In fact, I love to play the g.5, it is my only mini that I can play ridiculously fast with, this set back makes me a bit upset. I am actually looking into beefcaking it. So if you want to interpret my problems I have with 1 SB to mean that I hate all SBs feel free, but if so, then you are sorely misinterpreting my statement.
I know exactly what you are trying to say. Your issue is the bearing. I have had way more issues with C bearings than A bearings. Not like that statistic MATTERS anyways, becasue a BEARING IS A BEARING.
I am not assuming you hate all SB’s and I never said you did. I simply paired you with my previous comments about people disliking A bearings becasue you were ragging on the “issues” they have. You have a bad bearing. Not a bad A sized bearing, just a bad bearing. It doesn’t matter what size it is.
1 Like
This^
I love dual flush silicone because of how responsive it is, SBs just make that responsiveness better!
He doesn’t mean that the binds are slower, he means that the yoyo doesn’t have to be spinning as fast as a larger bearing yoyo to get an effective bind. Which is…kinda true, I guess. It depends more on gap width and the weight balance of the yoyo than the diameter of the bearing. Since due to design trends smaller bearing diameters almost always result in smaller gaps, though, it’s an easy stereotype to follow.
I propose that the real reason 5A became popular with small bearings is because when 5A was being developed, that’s what everyone was using—particularly those on the Duncan Crew. 5A took quite a while to grow, during which time most of the people pushing it were involved with Duncan or just using Freehands because of the name and the fact that they came with a counterweight. The Freehand was basically a bearing-modded Wheels put into production; I doubt there was a lot of thought put into the design other than “well, this worked pretty well, let’s copy it.” When people would ask what yoyo they should get for 5A, the response would of course be “get a Freehand, it comes with everything you need to get started.” So anyway, all these people got used to throwing 5A with Freehands, and when people asked them what they used, they’d say they favored Freehands—particularly the old guard who had a lot of experience. Eventually this built into the idea that small bearings are inherently better than large bearings for 5A, but nobody could quite pin down why…because in reality there wasn’t much of a practical reason.
In truth, the most important factor in what yoyo will work best for you for 5A is how comfortable you are with the yoyo and how it plays. The bearing size can affect that, but it won’t directly affect the yoyo’s inherent suitability for 5A. Look at the current roster of influential 5A players. Some of them are using small bearings, but quite a few of them are using large bearings now. If a certain bearing size made a yoyo actually better for 5A, I would think there wouldn’t be so much of a divide among such experienced players.
2 Likes
You’ve got to be wary about the the words of a fella who has publicly taken a stand against meatloaf. Who doesn’t like Meatloaf?
But in this case Elephark has made some interesting points that I hadn’t thought about. I had imagined that one of the reasons the Freehand was so popular is that the Duncan dice were weighted relative to the weight of the Freehand. But certainly, early 5a players didn’t use C sized bearings because - well, what percentage of yoyos had C sized bearings? My experience demonstrates that yoyos with different gaps and sizes and so forth mesh better with some plays of style and not others - thus, as with most things yoyo these days, best = preference.