Archives for January 4, 2013

First Fixed Friday of the year! Is anybody gonna spend 2013 throwing only fixed axle yo-yos? If you’re anything like me you’ve already screwed it up with sweet, sweet metal, but hey, it’s Friday, so let’s get back to our roots and toss the bearings aside.

Rather than teaching a roots trick, though, I’d like to show you another new school original concept. This week’s trick is called Dumptrucks; it first appeared as trick #300 in the 2012 365yoyotricks lineup, and is a simple yet surprisingly versatile stall dismount. It could be best described as a z-axis half-swing that dismounts the yo-yo while resetting spin direction, but frankly that’s a lot of jargon and it’s a lot easier to just watch the trick. Check it out!

Okay, now that you actually know what it looks like, lets break some of those buzzwords down. First off, this trick moves on the z-axis: most conventional yo-yo tricks happen while the yo-yo is spinning, which means that the spin is keeping the yo-yo stable. This is great, because eli hops would be a whole lot harder with the yo-yo floppin’ around all over the place, but you do start to get used to the idea that yo-yos stay in one plane, and most of us take for granted that we have to build all of our tricks on a single plane. Of course, nobody told Christopher Chia that, but we’ll leave the horizontal tech talk for later. The z-axis is relevant in this context because stalls stop the yo-yo from spinning, effectively “unlocking” the axis, so you can just swing that guy around, do flips, off-axis suicides, whatever.

Next up, “half-swing”. Once you’re in a trapeze stall, it’s possible to just swing the yo-yo around like an off-axis somersault. I don’t think that there’s really a name for this, so I just call them “swings”. This hasn’t led to too many useful tricks (so far), since it just starts you back where you started from, but the half-swing is interesting – basically, when the yo-yo is at the top of the swing, it’s in an upside-down trapeze. If you push out a bit and let gravity dismount the yo-yo, that’s a dumptruck!

The final portion of dumptruck tricks is remounting the yo-yo on the string, usually in a similar stall that you dismounted from. In our past two installments, when we dismounted out of our stalls the yo-yo was spinning the opposite direction, which meant that if we wanted to re-stall it would have to be on the opposite side of the string. Not so with dumptrucks! Swinging the yo-yo and dismounting halfway actually means that the yo-yo flips, which means that the yo-yo will be spinning the same direction it was before you mounted the stall. This can be really useful as a transition move in stall combos, because it lets you break out of that “left side, right side, left side, right side” rhythm or move into other more technical stall tricks. It also just feels really cool, so, you know. Learn it! Once you get the basic trapeze dumptruck down, it’s easy to start applying it to different mounts and from different setups. One thing that I’ve been messing with lately is trying to do them out of gorilla style/inverted trapeze. Learn it, use it, tell everybody about your new moves in the Fixed Friday Facebook group.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What implication does z-axis movement hold for string tricks? Is there gonna be a new weird wave of genuine string transition moves based around swings? Could half-swings solve the spin direction “problem” keeping stalls out of competitive 1A play? When Sisqo said “Dumps like a truck, what what” in “The Thong Song”, did he really think that that was a quality compliment? I mean, c’mon dude.

Also, as a little bit of bonus theory, did everybody see that awesome Yoyojam Theory video with Ben, Grant, and Yoshi? While the whole thing is incredible, Ben’s amazing flip trick at 37 seconds is especially applicable to fixie tricks – who’s gonna be the first to work that into a stall combo?