How to Clean a Yo-Yo Bearing

Yo-Yo Trick

So, as you get into yo-yo more and you get more advanced, you're going to hear people talk about cleaning bearings. I just want to talk about real quick 'cause it's important to understand what you're doing to a bearing when you're cleaning it. What people refer to when they're cleaning a bearing is they're actually using something like lighter fluid or mineral spirit which is a paint thinner which I don't highly recommend you use, but you're going to hear people talk about it so I just want you to understand it, is what they do is they put the bearing into this. This stuff will actually go down and break down everything in the bearing. It's going to break down all that lubricant in the bearing. It's going to allow the bearing to spin very freely because of that. There's going to be nothing to block it, nothing in its way. It's really going to help it move. The problem with that though, is after a while it's like those little ball bearings that you saw inside, inside the ball bearing, it's almost like they're going to start grinding down on each other overtime because there is no natural lube there. The bearings almost eat themselves alive really and eventually your bearing is just going to die. So if you do go to clean your bearing, be careful. You want to usually apply some thin lube after you clean it. That way the bearing won't just be eating itself alive. You'll have a much longer life with it and what not. The other thing to keep in mind is that things that clean your bearing like lighter fluid and mineral spirits can affect plastic. And if you have a plastic yo-yo and you go to clean your bearing with one of these things, it's going to probably crack your plastic, it's probably going to affect it, it can even melt it, so keep that in mind. If you have an all-metal yo-yo which is commonly used today, there's a lots of all metal yo-yo manufacturers out there. You don't have to worry about that so much, you could put it, you could clean the bearing, put it right back in the yo-yo. But if you have a plastic yo-yo, you go to clean the bearing with anything like lighter fluid or mineral spirits, it's going to affect the plastic and you don't want that to happen. So keep that in mind, when you go online and you start reading about cleaning your bearings out and what not.

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