Let me start right off by stating very clearly that I don’t doubt for one second that what you say you experienced with Draupnirs is your imagination. You have been around for quite awhile and you have thrown enough yoyos…
But while not discounting the validity of your experience; I have to say my experience with Draupnirs(and I have had several over time since they came out) aligns quite closely with Rosenbergs’.
I have nothing but slight kickback with my Draups… And I know the ‘kickback’ feel… No doubt.
I started modding in 98 and I can’t put a date on it because it wasn’t anything really notable to me. But I was well into the scene when guys started beefing Sharks and Renegades, etc.
Stuff was mainly front mount way back then. So when we threw the ‘Beef’ we would deliberately stand with our feet about 15 inches apart because the yoyos would literally swing back between your legs as they rolled down the string, lol.
If you threw with your elbow close to your torso, the kickback would even seem greater. If you extended your arm on the throw down and deliberately ‘threw forward’ the kickback would be much less severe.
Personally I didn’t care at all for beefing yoyos.
I think Doc Pop was one of the first guys to double up the bearings… Can’t remember?
You guys know how the beefing mod came about, right? Nobody ever told me this, but since I was kind of a modding machine waaay back then, I would always try and figure out what clicked in somebody else’s head before they made various yoyo performance enhancements.
This is my personal opinion but I do think it is pretty accurate regarding Beefcaking yoyos.
Realize Nobody…was really using ‘C’ size bearings. So the widest gap wasn’t that wide. The more advanced players ‘needed more gap’. The levels of their increasing skills was going beyond the performance potentials of the various small gap, small bearing yoyos. Beefing created additional gap width instantly and economically.
So I think the mod was was simply ‘the shortcut’ to a Wider gap. Once the C size bearing was put into yoyo designs, beef caking was ‘old’.
I’ve been throwing my Draupnirs deliberately since this thread started; trying to recognize as much kickback as possible by throwing various ways: string diameter, string length, various outer race configurations of C diameter bearings, clean or lubed, etc.
The Draupnir does have a ‘little kickback’ but not enough to even think about until this thread appeared.
But before that, I hadn’t even consciously thought about it.
PS. The Draupnir is a Top player in my opinion. There is nothing I don’t like about it.
PS 2. Actually there are a few minor things I could say I don’t care for. 1. I think the yoyo could retail for ‘less’ and 2. I think YYR should make more of them; instead of releasing them about 6 at a time, lol.