Writing the 28 Days project has been a lot of fun so far. It’s great to analytically dig through my collection and share what I find. What’s really been a blast has been looking at old yo-yos with a new perspective.
Take, for instance, the Wing Force by Yomega. The Wing Force, manufactured in 1998, was Yomega’s first “butterfly” shaped aluminum yo-yo. Upon first glance, the only thing that makes this yo-yo interesting is it’s very narrow body, but I was surprised when I opened mine up and found a removable spacer system that also doubled as a friction sticker surface.
When I thought about it more, I remembered that Yomega had a hard time selling all of their Wing Forces, so they actually experimented with various machining methods to update their pieces still in stock. The original model was a starburst yo-yo, which might have worked if not for the thick powder coat paint that ended up smoothing over the starburst teeth. The later models had a deep area lathed away where the starbursts used to be. The Raider style spacers had been replaced with a new, wide spacer system that was designed to fit the old friction stickers made by Custom.
It seems that Yomega made the precursor to the SPR system currently made by Buzz-On Yo-Yos. Since they were designed for a smaller friction sticker, the Yomega Wing Force spacers are slightly narrower than SPR spacers, but the design is very similar otherwise. SPR systems even fit great into Wing Forces.
With the narrow gap though, the yo-yo was far to responsive, I took out one of the wide spacers and replaced it with a Raider spacer. I then put the friction sticker into the gap that used to be covered by the wider spacer. This recessed sticker worked great if I only did it on one side and had a wide spacer with no sticker on it, but two recessed stickers were not responsive enough to get decent response. If only we’d known about bind returns back then.
