Below is a list of materials that I think yoyo companies have not explored enough, ranging in degrees of practicality from “personally I’m truly unsure why they haven’t done this yet” to “yeah it’s an ideal material for a yoyo but in all other means this is more of a joke.” The order descends in practicality, as in the further down you go the sillier producing one would be.
Bronze: Seriously unsure why bronze hasn’t taken the place of brass in yoyos that use brass. Like brass, it’s dense but it’s also wayyy tougher. Would likely be easy to machine seeing as how ancient civilizations did it with a hammer and anvil.
Chro-moly steel: Like SS, but even harder. The more chrome-y the shinier and harder the material. Obviously a bit more serious in how it should be handled, but it would be good for lighter-weight yoyos I think.
(Practicality begins to drop here, would probably be an alternative similar in price to titaniums)
Carbon fiber: Tougher than normal plastics but more brittle. Typically lighter than plastic too so good for a bimaterial probably. Also probably kind of expensive too.
Tungsten: The toughest metal in existence in most aspects. Also incredibly dense so it would be great as an outer-rim material due to it being probably nearly indestructible to the yoyoer who wasn’t trying to take a sledgehammer to it. Only problem is that outside of making tiny filaments for light bulbs it is incredibly hard to machine, making titanium look like a chump. Would quickly make yoyos heavy and would be hard to produce.
(Practicality goes wayyyyy down from here)
Platinum: Platinum would be like brass, just a bit expensive, however.
Depleted uranium: Want weight? Depleted Uranium baby! Don’t mind the fact that depleted uranium is still radioactive. It’s also pretty sturdy
Call it the CoNi Island special, although copper’s elemental symbol is cu. Eh either way CoNi works better than the element-accurate version of the name
What about ceramics? Some are nearly indestructible and of variable composition and density. Seems like you could create variable densities in the same body using fused ceramics.
Another thing I have wondered about is laminated metals; then machined into a yo-yo. Again; this might offer novel weight distributions.
I have mentioned tungsten before but kind of as a joke. Tungsten is a very hard metal and a very heavy metal. Hardness and strength are not necessarily the same thing with metal. With how thin you would have to get rims with tungsten for the total weight to stay playable, they would be brittle.
The only thing i could think is thermal fitting an aluminum body around a tungsten weight ring. The results would still be a wrecking ball. (still looking for my lead filled mosquito)
I actually disagree with you simply because i have seen Tungsten as a ring before. It was not brittle in the slightest, or if it was, the fact that my dad (the owner of the ring) hit it with a hammer was not enough to overcome the toughness part of it. If memory suits me right not only is Tungsten the hardest metal on the Vickers hardness scale (although not Mohs), it is also like the second toughest, meaning that it is very resistant to shearing, snapping, and that sort of thing. Granted I could be remembering wrong, but I would like to hope that my reading on the element stuck.
Either way yes a Tungsten yoyo would 100% be a wrecking ball
I have one of those tungsten rings. My brother had to replace one that broke when he took it off and dropped it on a tile floor. Pretty much all tungsten wedding bands are tungsten carbide, a 50/50 mix of carbon and tungsten. Without the carbon, it is very brittle. With the carbon it becomes somewhat more ductile but still cannot escape the general rule of hardness=brittleness. Perhaps an as of yet unknown tungsten alloy could manage to strike that golden point of hardness that stainless steel has and yet retain its extreme density.
Ahh i thought the ring was pure tungsten. That would explain that. Maybe tungsten carbide then as a rim material for a heavyweight yoyo then would actually be kinda practical. Or maybe like tungsten carbide with some of tungsten’s more flexible cousin molybdenum, or a high-carbon steel-tungsten alloy would work
