YoYoJam SpeedMaker?

Do you need shims to make it unresponsive? If so, what size?

According to the store page, (above), it has an adjustable gap, meaning you can adjust its responsiveness. Unscrew it a little, it’ll become less responsive, tighten it a little, it’ll become more responsive. No need for shims!

I unscrewed mine to the point of it ALMOST fell apart and it was still way too responsive. I will admit, I haven’t checked the bearing. I know the bearing in my Pinnacle was not up to par. Rather than clean it, I just swapped it. I need to go through my loose bearings today anyways.

I’m probably going to pull the O-ring and silicone that and my Kickside. Although, sometimes I think I’ll just leave them as is for noobs to try out at my meets.

so should i get shims?

I won’t know until I silicone it, and I won’t get to that until next week. My priorities right now are my Friday and Saturday sound gigs.

what I did to make it unresponsive was

  1. shave the o-ring. you do that by taking a knife and whittling pieces of the o-ring off. then turn the o-ring over to the smooth,non whittled side.
    2.widen gap to widest setting possible.
    3.either break stock bearing in or change to clean bearing, both work. however, if you want to change the bearing you need to use a bearing removal tool because the bearing is pretty stuck on there.

if you want it “dead” unresponsive you have to change to a clean bearing. With the stock bearing it wasn’t dead unresponsive but unresponsive enough to do whips

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Here’s what I did. I’ve been cleaning a LOT of bearings recently, mostly trying to figure out what bearings to send out for a special cleaning process.

YYJ puts in an OK bearing in their low-end throws, such as the Kickside, Speed Maker and Pinnacle. I’ve cleaned ALL of these bearings. Actually, with the Pinnacle I swapped the bearing as I needed much better performance. But with the Kickside and the Speed Maker, they are adjustable gap yoyos. I opened them up as much as was wise after cleaning the bearings(giving me anywhere from 12-15 seconds of spin after 2 rounds of: 1 drop of thick lube and spin, 1 drop of thin lube and spin, 15 minute soak in mineral spirits, 30 minute dry and spin and blown dry, 15 minute soak in acetone, 10 minute dry and spin. Repeat.

Bearings went from 2 seconds to 12-15 seconds.

Results:
Kickside and Speed Maker went completely unresponsive. If I want them responsive, I can tighten them back up. Easy! No real mods at all.

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