Yo-Yo String Maintenance

Yo-Yo Trick

So, next we're going to talk about different types of yo-yo string and when it's time to replace your yo-yo string. A lot of you asked me how often do you replace your yo-yo string and it's kind of funny. When you first start, you don't need to do it too much, sometimes three months is actually the first time you'll need to replace it. Depends how much you play with it though. If you're playing with it as much as we do, as professional yo-yo players, you actually need to replace it almost once a day, sometimes when you're at a contest, you'll go through 10, 20, sometimes even 30 strings if you're heavily practicing with them. So let me show you real quick, I've got two different types of strings here. This is a polyester string. This string is made entirely of polyester. Because of that, it's really slick and smooth. I know you can't feel this, but I'm running my hand across, it's very smooth. At the end of the yo-yo string, you've got two strands of string twisted together here. You can open up one end of the string and this is what actually fits around the physical yo-yo itself. I'm going to use strand on around the axle and that's what holds onto like that. But just know, this is how a string is constructed, it's really just--it's actually one long string that comes over itself and it's twisted together, but you do have two strands here and then at the end, you've got a regular knot tied just like so. Here I've got, this is a string that's a mixture of cotton and polyester, so it's like this one, just with little more cotton in it. Sometimes the polyester can actually melt for certain tricks, so people will therefore switch over to a cotton/polyester mixture. They also make 100 percent cotton strings. We don't highly recommend those because with the style of yo-yoing we're doing today, the cotton slows down the yo-yo a lot and it's more likely to break from impact if you're throwing really hard or something like that. The cotton string is going to snap on you before the rest of the strings will. You might ask when do I need to replace my yo-yo string and the easiest answer is if you're yo-yo is not playing that great or if your string looks like this, you can take a look and see. This one is starting to look a little gross, you'll notice that it's getting kinda fray down here. I'm not sure if you can pick that up on the camera, but it is, so if you look down and see that your string is all frayed out, if it doesn't look like it's the same color, these are all good signs that it might be time to replace your string. Strings are cheap, they're usually 20 cents a piece at most, so I highly recommend picking up a bundle if you're going to get into yo-yoing. It's going to help you out a lot in the long run if you keep track of that stuff.

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