Help me with my science project on yoyos! {merged}

Really now that I re-consider, it should go up to 11. :smiley:

Great idea! You might want to clean the bearings or something, so the lube doesn’t mess the experiment up.

Nearly impossible to implement sadly. As other have pointed out every variance and variable will come into play. Unless you made some simple machine to drop them all the exact same every time, youll get flawed results. If you get different throwers to help, one may throw a 30 second sleeper another might be able to throw a 3 minute sleeper with same equip.

String, string condition, string tension, response pads, response pad condition, lube (fresh, broken in, residuals left from cleaning, how they were cleaned…), humidity, heat, even minute difference in the tolerance of the bearings manufacturing all will affect the desired and accurate outcomes to test sleep times from some bearings against other bearings.

This is one of those very complicated answers to a very simple question. Honestly I dont know how it could be pulled off with even a remote degree of accuracy. Considering its for a 10yo science project, i wouldnt worry about it. They arent looking for exact info, just that you did the project.

Good luck!

What you can do is talk about different bearing sizes. Talk about Size A bearings and Size C bearings. Calculate out the moment of inertia of each, and explain the benefits and cons to each.

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This is all true. :frowning:

For clarification, the experiment I set out would be more to test the throwers than the bearing.
But I’m biased because I think most common yoyo logic is hearsay. (insert sad bear meme)

No, no, no. You need at least 12.

Use identical yoyos and new strings of the same length. Let the yoyo roll off some kind of incline. It won’t spin too fast, but that shouldn’t matter if you are just comparing bearings.

Doing this means the yoyos will get an equal spin (from rolling down the same surface from the same distance, no need to worry about thrower difference.

The trickiest part would be getting the wound up identically, but you could count the winds to get it pretty close.

Was going to drop them at the same time. Ugh. Idk now

You mean yr 10 right? Not 10 yo.

Year ten is very different from ten year old, but that’s not typically how we say it in the states so that might have been the confusion. We usually say tenth grade, or sophomore.

The only problem I see with dropping the yoyo from a machine is that most of the benefit of a string centering bearing is gained from I staying centered during a trick.

I’m not trying to dissuade you, I’m just saying you might have to be clever about what you test for and how.

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My brother is currently doing a project on the spin time of different yoyo shapes. Although you would need to take out all other variables. To do it correctly, you would need to use the OneDrop Benchmark series, as they are all the same except for shape. Bearing just doesn’t matter as much.

And shape probably matters less.

Cant afford them mate

This.

Mass is probably going to be a bigger factor than shape.

What I plan to do is drop the yoyo by letting it fall off of a table and timing how long it spins for.
My question is this:
Since ceramic bearings are supposed to reduce friction, does it matter that I am not throwing the yoyos with as much force as possible?
What I mean is, for example the steel bearing say it spins for 15 seconds when dropped, but 3m for a strong throw.
But the ceramic bearing spins for 16 seconds when dropped but 3m 30s for a strong throw.
Would something like this happen? Or is it irrelevant. Help pls

The experiment seems ok, but I don’t know how well it will really translate to real yoyoing.

It shouldn’t matter as long as you mention it in your paper, like the exact string length, the yoyo specs.

One thing that you need to do is balance the yoyo by twisting the string when it’s spinning, so the yoyo body does not touch the string AT ALL. This is important because the friction between the string and the body will kill spin time a lot more than the friction inside the bearing. The yoyo should not stop because of the string rubbing the body, but rather it has to stop from the friction of the bearing itself.

Also try to use the bearings of the same company or at least similar quality if you can, because any allegedly ‘better’ material with bad manufacturing will most likely perform worse than the ‘lesser’ material made in high standards.

Okay, but I’m still confused on the whole throwing it hard thing. If the steel spins for 12 seconds and the ceramic spins for 18, can I say it is 50% better?

For your particular scenario and method, yes. Maybe not ‘50% better’ as it’s too broad, but more like ‘it spins 50% longer therefore the better choice’.
It doesn’t have to answer every possible scenario, as long as if other people do the same experiment with the same method they get identical results. In the future you or someone else may use a different method and then have a different result, it’s okay. You can then say that this new method is more accurate and closer to real world scenario because this and that, things like that.

Thanks mate. I appreciate your time.