Sunday, February 07, 2010

YoYos

When I was a kid, one of my favourite toys was a red wooden YoYo, a gift from my father. I never really did much with it, but was happy to make it go up and down. Something about the spin and the anti gravitational effect of climbing up the string was mesmerizing.


It wasn’t until a few years later when I was in grade five (I think) that YoYo’s made a big splash at my elementary school with the Coca Cola and Sprite “return tops”. The school yard was full of them and it was only then that I learned a few tricks: “Sleeper”, “Around the world”, “Loop the Loop”, “Three Leaf Clover”, “The Breakaway”, and the ever popular “Walk the Dog” and “Rock the Baby”. But like every craze, it faded away...


But I never forgot my favorite toy... As an adult, I could always find YoYos branded with company names at conferences or trade shows. This one with Sun’s Java logo (definitely a collector’s item) I picked up in San Francisco at the JavaOne conference in 2004.


Fortunately for me, my wife knows I like these things so she gave me this Yomega Firestorm Wing YoYo as a Christmas gift around the same time. “Everyone should get a toy in their stocking” was her very sound reasoning. Now this little beauty was a bit different from every other YoYo I’d ever owned... for two reasons. One was it’s shape. It has what’s called a Butterfly Design. I didn’t know it at the time, but the flared shape is meant for doing string tricks; the shape helps you land the YoYo on a string. The more traditional design on the other hand, is best for looping tricks, the kinds of things I was doing as a kid. The other thing that was new to me was that it has a transaxle, basically a plastic sleeve around the metal axle that allows it to spin freely. That small improvement made things like the sleeper a breeze. Again this design enables string tricks. But not knowing that at the time... I just kept did the same old stuff as always, got bored and eventually put it down in my growing collection.


It was a few years later when my curiosity about YoYos was piqued again. A guy at work bought a Duncan Bumblebee YoYo and informed me about its ballbearing transaxle. Instead of a simple plastic sleeve, this thing had a ballbearing that allowed for even longer sleeps. Shortly afterwards I found the Yomega Raider for sale at The Discovery Hut in Chinook Centre here in Calgary and quickly bought it. After that day and thanks to the wonders of the web I was able to discover a lot more about the resurgence of this toy and found myself wanting to combine the shape of the Firestorm with the ballbearing axle of the Raider.


In 2007 I bought the Duncan Freehand YoYo at Games People Play at the North Hill Shopping Centre in Calgary. It has the butterfly shape and the ballbearing axle and it came with a mini instructional DVD. That’s where I learned about string tricks and freehand tricks... not that I could actually perform them. Even the starting trick “Man on the Flying Trapeze” (aka, “Flying Trapeze” or just “Trapeze”) was too much for me. I just couldn’t land it consistently. But I kept trying.


That leads me to where I am today. Last Christmas I got a YoYoJam New Breed. Its Butterfly shape is a bit more dramatic than the Freehand, has a wide gap, a large ball bearing transaxle and is made from a combination of plastic and metal (which may again enhance sleep times because of the extra weight at the edge). It’s this YoYo (and replacement strings from yoyoGstring) that finally got me interested in playing again. I also can’t go without highly recommending a series of short instructional videos on YouTube by AndrĂ© Boulay. They’ve helped me learn the “bind return” skill and tricks like “Trapeze”, “Double or Nothing”, “BrainTwister”, “Split the Atom”, “Zipper”, “The Matrix”, “Drop in the Bucket”, and “Plastic Whip”.


YoYos have come a long way and so have the tricks. I find it pretty fun and have only started trying to learn the advanced stuff. For inspiration check out this latest video from a Calgary company called Saturn Precsion Yo-Yos (SPYY) or this one from an Edmonton based company called Caribou Lodge Yoyoworks (CLYW)