Yoyo instability; am I using the right term?

General Yo-Yo
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Forgive me for how long this post is, but I’m not sure how to get into this and stay super brief, so here goes.

I see a lot of yoyo reviews talk about yoyo stability, and I think I understand what they mean by that. If I am understanding correctly, they mean that the gyroscopic force of the yoyo is sufficient to keep it straight as it gets looped around the fingers and such, and that things like vibe and weight distribution don’t detract from the straightness of the yoyo as it spins down.

If stability has nothing to do with how straight a yoyo stays as it goes through tricks and combos, then someone please tell me what term I should be using instead. Because I discovered something rather surprising (and dismaying) about many of my higher end yoyos: they don’t stay straight for very long.

I’ve been testing all my metal yoyos for straightness by throwing a strong sleeper and just holding the yoyo in place, watching it spin. Note that I always make sure they have perfectly neutral string tension before I throw.

The worst offender so far is my VTWO. Even with a good, straight throw, it begins to turn about the vertical axis almost immediately, and goes from pointing straight ahead at 12 o’clock to sideways at 9 o’clock in about ten seconds. No wonder I was having so much trouble with it teetering and going off-axis while going from a trapeze to its brother and back. Maybe it is the flat bearing it comes with, but it is nearly impossible to throw it such that the string just happens to be centered on the bearing, and that seems to result in a lateral tilt, which may contribute to the turning behavior.

This phenomenon seems the most evident with my monometals, but even some of my bimetals do this. However, a couple of my monometals stays dead straight: my YYF Dogma and my iYY TiRROX, for example. And, of course, a few of my bimetals stay dead straight too: my YYF Edge, G2 Elite 2018, and YYR Draupnir. I even have plastics that stay straight for longer than many of my metal yoyos.

For some reason this really surprises me. I thought that with all that incredible spin time (of metal yoyos) came incredible stability (again, correct me if I’m not using the right term), but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Should I not be surprised by this?

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Flat bearings arnt as lenient with sloppy plains/planes. :man_shrugging:t3:

But flat bearings are great for getting your technique perfect.

I notice a huge difference between the play of flat and centering bearings. My style is still sloppy so I do better with centering bearings.

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Precession happens to all yoyos. I think yoyos with more weight on the edges have a slower procession but it happens. I notice it while doing repetitive tricks like the matrix where I tend to finish on a different plane than the one I started on. If that makes sense lol.

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Ah, yes, precession!

It may be true that all yoyos technically fall prey to it at some point while they spin down, but it seems to me that a yoyo like the VTWO shouldn’t exhibit so much of it so immediately.

Does anyone else have a yoyo in its price tier, designed for contest performance, that turns 45 degrees in under 20 seconds (after a strong, straight sleeper throw)?

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You can send me your VTWO and I’ll give it a testrun for you :hugs:

But seriously though, The reason the VTWO appears to be the worst is almost certainly because it has a flat bearing. I’m pretty sure most if not all the yoyos you have, especially higher end ones, have a CT or some other centering bearing. This will help mitigate the precession.

It is also due to precession that yoyos are naturally less stable with a flat bearing than a centering.

@vegabomb brought up that the more rim weight a yoyo has, the less precession that occurs. I’ve actually noticed the opposite. The first time I significantly noticed this phenomena was years ago. This was during a time when many yoyos didn’t have super high amounts of rim weight. I really first noticed this phenomena when I tried using flat bearings in my YYR, and oh. My. Gosh. It was an awful experience.

I also noticed precession was really bad with the bimetals that I owned. On the other hand, my ODs and some of my lower end yoyos didn’t play that much worse with flat bearings vs centering bearing.

So I’ve always thought that the more rim weight a yoyo has, the more precession it has, and the worse it performs with a flat bearing.

Im not even sure if this is really right and/or maybe some other factor of construction could affect precession as well.

It’s a topic that I’ve never really seen discussed for some reason and I think I tried to make a thread about it a long time ago but nobody really gave an explanation.

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Tell you what, I will put a Center Trac bearing into the VTWO and see how that changes things. If that doesn’t help significantly, I’ll send it to you for you to evaluate yourself.

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It has to be something else that effects precession as well, I’m just not sure what it is.

In general I have noticed the more rim weight the worse the precession but I have noticed certain companies’ yoyos play much better with flat bearings than others.

OD is probably the best example. For some reason, I and also many others have noticed that ODs play exceptionally well with flats for some reason.

On the other end of the spectrum, YYRs I’ve had are notoriously bad with flats in them.

I guess I should also note though that sitting stability like your testing doesnt exactly correspond to its stability in play

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Can confirm, VTWO with a G2 Boss Rage bearing works awesome.

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I have a feeling that just about anything with a G2 Boss Rage bearing will work awesomely. I’m beginning to seriously think I should stock up on some to put into more of my yoyos.

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If you want to buy a bunch, I recommend Buddha bearings.

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I have this problem with my YYF wedge, and now that I think about it, it’s my only yoyo with a flat bearing.

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I’m gonna definitely have to 2nd Buddha bearings.

Wowow we finally agree on something :rofl:

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Precession happens to ALL yoyos, it’s physics at the end of the day.

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Sure. But one can empirically demonstrate that some yoyos exhibit the precession sooner after a throw (and to a more exaggerated degree) than others. The question I had was, what’s the mostly likely cause(s) of such substantial differences in behavior from one yoyo to the next?

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The Buddha Ripple 10-ball bearing looks an awful lot like a G2 Boss Rage bearing. Where does Jake source his bearings? Could they actually be the same thing?

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Those 2 bearings are actually a “rip-off” of the Trifecta bearing. As far as I know, the trifecta was the first bearing mass produced and sold with that concave+dimple design

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I don’t think they’re the same, the Rage’s have that metal dealeo in one side (where’s you can’t really see the balls) and I believe Buddha’s do not, you can see the balls on both sides.

Buddha bearings are good though, the double double rocks.

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Trifecta as in the one twisted stringz used to sell?

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Yeah

10 characters ugh

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So I put a Buddha Ripple bearing that I had laying around into the VTWO and it made a big difference. I have a whole new appreciation for centering bearings.

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