Would it be possible for the imperial guts side to take a coreco response pad or is the D bearing too big?
the first one the nice dark blue one looks VERRYYY appealing to me it also reminds me of an edgeless
The coreco pads are for A-bearings. I designed this one for D on both sides so you could pull the bearing off and swap it around without having to keep an extra bearing on you. Not ideal but it’s something.
This means you’ll either be playing 1a with a flat bearing 
or playing 2a with a KK or CT bearing
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s super cool, and would consider buying one if it came to market. I was just thinking about ways to increase the responsiveness (without just resorting to lubing the bearing) when played in the imperial shape. ID on Core Co pads is 12mm, and OD on the D bearing is 11mm, so I was just curious. At any rate, it’s a super fun idea to play with, and thanks for sharing it!
Maybe 555s would work.
Fun fact:
To mask off the response area during blasting, the machine shop has to make custom plastic inserts to cover that area. One per yo-yo half. This is an extra cost between materials and labor, which is probably why you don’t see it on most yo-yos.
how about tons of duct tape? Doesn’t that work too?
That’s one way of doing it, but certainly not the smartest.
Covering the gap area is a must if you have rougher blasts:
(ILYY Wasabi 2009 with CandyBlast)
It’s what my machine shop recommended, at any rate. I imagine there’s some different blasting setups you can use that are more efficient for different types of masking?
There is way that enables re-use of the masking for multiple batches, perfect centering, perfect boundaries and improved handling during blasting. It doesn’t depend on the size of the blasting medium.
While I believe this to be common knowledge, I haven’t seen said method mentioned anywhere which is why regard it as non-disclosed business knowledge and won’t explain the details.
That’s perfectly fair. I know you have a reputation for some of the best finishes in the yo-yo business so I would expect you to keep a lot of that close. 
I’m pretty much brand new to this so I’m discovering things as I go!
Update?
lol nice. Jacob you are the best, man.
holy crap
If anyone’s looking for a good color to render gold rings, here’s my favorite so far for Fusion 360. You can copy these values into your own appearance. Looks way better than “shiny 100% yellow”.
(This is a really rough first draft of nothing in particular specifically to show off the rings)
that looks super cool.
I started trying to use CAD for yoyos two days ago. @Durfee wanted me to make a draw up a mk1 diffraction that had flatter rims and was a tiny bit wider. So here’s my first (serious) design, the durfraction
