It’s always great when an old friend comes back to visit. When we last saw Steve Buffel he was closing up shop for SPYY to spend more time with his family and less time staying up until the wee hours of the night running an amazingly high quality yoyo company. Looks like he just couldn’t stay away, though! He caught the bug, and had to make his contribution to the Year of Titanium™!

Why titanium?  Why now?  It came down to me missing the community, yoyo friends, contests and wanting to somehow explore titanium as a way to re-engage myself.  There’s been a big hole left in my life after closing SPYY.  I guess the hangover of running the business has somewhat subsided and I wanted to get back in touch with the things that inspired me to run my own yoyo business in the first place.

The development of this design became the ultimate SPYY hybrid of sorts.  I looked at my favorites and infused elements of each into this super fun and high performing yoyo.  Titanium is a seductive, yet sinister alloy!  The temptation is to exploit every bit of strength and thin down the walls to a mere fraction of that of an aluminum yoyo, pushing all the weight to the rim.  After countless CAD studies and trials I came to the conclusion that one could make a yoyo spin forever, but at what cost?  I tweaked and tweaked the geometry over and over to exploit the benefits of added rim weight, while not getting greedy and going overboard.  A heavy hand with rim weighting can easily result in a sluggish feel with excessive kickback… that uninspiring rock on a string feeling.  My hope is that I struck the ultimate balance between precision, float, spin and fun!

Manufacturing this yoyo became more of a challenge that anticipated for myself, our CNC programmers and machine operators.  This stuff is pure EVIL!  Titanium pushes back hard, wears out carbide inserts and kills tools with an explosive bang and sparks!  SPYY has produced over 20,000 aluminum yoyo halves with the same tooling and inserts. Aluminum is THAT forgiving.  Titanium burns them up every ten pieces or less!  We’ve had to regroup several times during this process in an attempt to tame the evil alloy sometimes referred to as “unobtainium”. That being said, the finished product is stunning to look at, hold and feel, while playing like nothing SPYY’s ever produced before!

This release is officially designated as TYY-01 and is limited to around 150 pieces.  This may be it for SPYY’s adventures in titanium. The cost and time required to produce them was staggering, possibly making it suicide to consider doing it again.  We’ll see how this release is accepted by our community.

Watch eBay account saturnprecision spyy.bigcartel.com Sunday, November 8th at noon EST for the official release.

$300 USD ($400 CAD), shipping included.

SPYY TYY Specs:

Alloy: Titanium
Mass: 65.5 grams
Diameter: 56.5mm
Width: 41 mm
Gap: 4mm
Bearing: Large C Dif-e-Yo KonKave
Responce: CBC 19mm Slim Pads
Axle: 316 stainless steel