We made a titanium yo-yo!

[codinghorror]

It’s a long story, but we made a titanium yo-yo!

The Legendary Ti-Vayder Titanium Yo-Yo

It’s been interesting herding this project forward, it’s my first experience directly working with Chinese manufacturers (I basically mailed them 3D CAD scans), and my first experience selling actual physical products online instead of… software. Even the final boxing up was interesting, to make a real “retail” product with logos and stickers and fancy packaging.

I used Shopify as my storefront, which is fairly common, I guess? $29/month plus a small percent of sales for handling the payment transactions.

I certainly didn’t want to be in the business of shipping packages all over the world. Luckily the rise of Kickstarter and similar services have created quite a cottage industry of fulfillment companies. On the recommendation of @DocPop we shipped all the boxed products over to http://www.noonaco.com/ who accesses the Shopify storefront directly and ships everything.

Anyway check it out at https://tivayder.com and remember, this yo-yo will, in fact, make you as good as this guy

[DocPop]

Jeff appeared on my yo-yo vlog to discuss this yo-yo in more detail

[RickMycroft]

Titanium Yo-Yo sounds like the perfect side-kick for Metal Bat.

Bad

[codinghorror]

Titanium also has a melodic ring to it in play, as illustrated here:

(no really, it does)

[codinghorror]

I meant to mention, if you are in the US (due to shipping reasons) and are interested in / curious about the world of modern yo-yos, PM me your address (work address, whatever you prefer) and I will mail you a free yo-yo to try out that you can keep. Not titanium, but a solid modern plastic with ball bearing and silicone response pads. It’s not chopped liver!

Let me limit this offer to 4 people just in case things get nuts. You can never tell with free stuff …

edit: this offer is open until end of August, just to put a time cap on it as well.

[Skeptic]

@DocPop

Jeff appeared on my yo-yo vlog to discuss this yo-yo in more detail

Neat. As someone who’s thrilled just to get a yo-you to come back without twisting on the string I had no idea that yo-yo’s have become evolved, high tech versions of what I remember as the Duncan Butterfly, and that now look like, and can be used like, juggler’s diablos.

The video shows that Jeff is awesomely nerdy, more so than I knew from his posts here. Very cool project. The video really put it into context.

I’m a little confused about the titanium since I don’t know metallurgy. I remember reading about the development of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and that there was a problem with fingerprints causing damage to the titanium. Is that just a problem for titanium if you are going to be welding or anodizing it? Is titanium corrosion resistant to fingerprints, since it is used for things like expensive watches?

[DocPop]

I can’t speak much on the limitations of fingerprints other than to say than most titanium yo-yos are unfinished and don’t seem to have any issues with oils from the hands. It must have been something about not being able to weld it.