Polar Opposites
Mar 5th, 2008 by $eth
Funny how I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for about a year now, and today while I was digging through an old box of yo-yos i found the subject. The Super Tech Steel Bearing type Classic Yo-Yo…
Last year while I was on a roadtrip for spring break Abe John Bot and I stopped at a truck stop. Walking in this caught my eye. I can’t remember the exact cost of it, but it was around $3. Ball Bearing. In fact, it came with 2 bearings and 2 sets of spacers. The bearing pictured was a very small ‘looping’ bearing. and a wider “string trick” bearing was packaged with it.
Its a really close knock off to the Duncan Imperial’s shape. But thats where the similarities end. The Plastic feels like polycarbonate, not the soft sticky K-Resin that Imperials are made of. There are also design flaws with the Super Tech. The biggest ones are the thin threading and nut being molded into the body. Thats just asking for over tightening and cracking.
It’s really interesting to see yo-yos getting more and more expensive. Established manufactures like Yo-Yo Factory, SPYY, CLYW, Dif-e-Yo and Anti-Yo set trends while others scramble to imitate them. Yet there are always high quality, low cost yo-yos that do the job. This Super Tech and the FAST 201 come to mind first. Well made with quality product with a really nice price tag. These kind of yo-yos should be the trend setters.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The Shinwoo yo-yos are another good example of really cheap, well made, good players.
It would be really interesting to see what would happen if YYF went the opposite direction and put out a hubstack yo-yo made out of plastic that the average kid could afford to buy and not worry about dinging up. I think we’d probably see alot more experimentation and innovation with hubstack related tricks.
That said, I think it’s kind of telling that there’s 19 responses to the Ti YYF post below and only one to this post. The hype machine is hard to get rolling for a $3.00 yo-yo I guess.
P.S. I am carrying a XXXXL around now as my pocket yo, so I guess I may be a bit hypocritical.
I took us 12 months to make plastic dial yo-yos after making metal ones…. patience…
Didn’t the G5 come out almost 14 months ago?
I fall guilty of it to haha. 888 has ben my yo-yo of choice for a while now.