So I made a wooden (fixed axle) yoyo for a friend and the first he said about it was ‘my yoyo vibes a lot’. It actually annoyed me a lot.
Every single wooden yoyo I have from different manufacturers has varying degrees of visible vibe and I honestly couldn’t care less.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that some people would expect a handmade wooden yoyo to be as smooth as glass.
That would certainly be annoying!
Yeah, they’re made of wood!!! Really in wood yoyos, I consider vibe part of the charm.
We’ve had several wooden yo-yos by various manufacturers returned for “unplayable vibe” - It’s never that bad, people are just overly picky.
Yes, they are spoiled by the precision metals that are available.
In the learning process I’ve made a few bad ones that are unplayable, with probably close to 5mm of visible vibe. But nothing I’ve bought from YYE is anywhere near unplayable.
i dunno man, my no-jives are pretty smoo ooth.
Just read an interesting article on what is “smooth”. Not yoyo related, but going to post it anyway.
https://thedailyskep.com/2016/11/20/michael-mascelli-perfect-in-1000-words-or-less/
Personally, it should never annoy anyone that builds anything when your work is critiqued. If a customer tells you (or even a friend) that a yoyo you made has too much vibe, for me I’d start looking at how to minimize that. Can you get rid of it completely, probably not, but why not try?
All but one of my TMBR’s are almost completely smooth, the 10-15 No Jive’s I’ve kept in my collection are the same way. Out of the 50 or so fixed axles I own, very few have visible vibe, and the ones that do I’m fairly confident I could get rid of it if I wanted to.
The standard should really be as smooth as possible, and when you get to that point try to find ways to make it even smoother. There are a lot of ways to minimize vibe on fixed axles, especially for the guys making them with routers. Matching weight of halves, matching grain, orientation of the halves.
Really, you should want as many people as possible to enjoy what you’re making, so if minimizing vibe does that, that should be a goal. We shouldn’t have an elitist attitude that “fixed axles have vibe, and you need to learn how to deal with it.”
When creating anything, unless you 100% know you are building the best product on the market, feedback should never be annoying.
Wouldn’t even occur to me to measure vibe on a wooden yoyo, unless it just wasn’t playable.
wood is an incredibly variable material to work with for yoyo. I would not expect a wooden yoyo to ever be as smooth as something CNC machined of aluminum.
Critique on what I make does not usually annoy me, the harshest critic of my work is myself.
It annoyed me for three reasons:
A. The first and only comment he made about it was ‘it has vibe’.
B. For a wooden fixed axle, it had fairly minimal vibe, certainly within reasonable tolerances.
C. He complained about vibe in yoyo that was handmade out of a natural hygroscopic material of varying density.
Now, of course I always aim to make yoyos as smooth as possible. Always. What gives you the impression I haven’t tried? You’re assuming that I don’t. I know the techniques for wood selection and construction to ensure the smoothest fixed axle possible and employ them meticulously.
And wooden fixed axle yoyos will ALWAYS have varying degrees of vibe. This is not an ‘elitist attitude’ just a fact.
I own TMBR, O.U.T, Tom Kuhn and Yoyofactory fixed axle wooden yoyos. It amazes me to hear you say that so few of yours have visible vibe. Every single wooden yoyo I own has visible vibe, some more than others. I think we must have different standards as to what constitutes visible vibe.
I like feedback about my yoyos, but when someone throws a wooden yoyo for a while and the only thing they have to say about it is ‘it has vibe’, it seems more like ignorance to me.
I hear you, Brian. This happens from time to time to me too even with very careful production. I find that certain species of wood are far more likely to produce wobbly yoyos that others. There are some woods that I’ve used where it’s nearly impossible to make a reasonably smooth one.
Should’ve stated that I wasn’t making my remarks at anyone directly. They were just general comments, didn’t mean to make it sound like I was directing them to you. Sorry about that.
Visible Vibe = if I can see it vibe, it’s visible vibe.
And I agree, with anything if all someone can point out are flaws, or even worse perceived flaws, that is highly frustrating.
+1 my response exactly.
Also he might not understand how wood is inherently inconsistent when it comes to density.
I had an experience making wooden yoyos before. It turns out about 40% of it are unplayable due to vibe (about 5 mm visual vibe), about 40% had about 1-2 mm vibe which I still consider playable. and less than 20% are about .5 mm vibe which I consider smooth. After tuning them, some of the vibey ones can become playable. The rest is burning wood.
Once you’ve had that experience you’ll appreciate how hard making wooden yoyo is.
I have quite a bit of vibe too, so I rarely complain about that. 
You mean your eh yoyo?..
no i mean me.
all of existence is vibration, oscillation, precession. whether we’re talking about light or sound, or the rhythm of our lives, it’s all we notice. so it doesn’t concern me that my yo-yo should not be 100% smooth, because smoothness is an illusion of scale. a still yo-yo sitting on a desk is in a state of constant vibration.
i yo-yo because it’s playing a game with reality - with the rules which govern the whole universe. i don’t want to make-believe like my toys are in some ineffable vacuum state. i prefer playing wood yo-yo’s BECAUSE of their limitations - not in spite of them. part of why my own style is stall/stop-driven is because it nullifies the limitations of friction and vibration.
This reminded me, and I’m trying to find it now, I read a paper once that the universe resonates/vibrates at a Bb, forgot the actual numerical frequency. It was really interesting, I’ll post it if I can find it.
…or utilizes…
Yeah. Nullifying kind of contradicts what he was saying.
semantics? i just mean it takes issues most consider to be problems and makes them “not problematic”.
