The idea for the Excess began long before the Speakeasy was ever released, but before I had the design skills and experience required to truly make something special. The Speakeasy was a great success, despite me having only been in the hobby for a year at that point, but I knew that the sophomore release for the brand needed to be something truly special to cement the design philosophy of what I am trying to build. I think the Excess is a perfect distillation of that philosophy, and has truly extracted the potential of stainless steel as a material.
Why Stainless Steel?
Stainless Steel is an incredibly durable and dense material. As a result we normally see the use of stainless steel in yoyo design as a rim in bimetal yoyos in order to pack on rim weight and power efficiently. The extreme density of SS is both what makes it extremely challenging to design with, and also what makes it such a rewarding material to use. Each element of the yoyo must be designed extremely efficiently or the mass of the yoyo will skyrocket past your target weight.
Design
Most fully SS yoyos tend to be undersized in order to keep the overall weight of the yoyo within the typical range. Unfortunately undersized yoyos are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to pure performance as weight is more efficient the further its distance from the center of the yoyo. In terms of rotational inertia (power) the most dominating factor is the diameter of the yoyo, not the mass (I = mr^2 in its most simplified sense). It is especially important to consider this fact when working with a dense material, as you need to be as efficient as possible with the weight you have to work with. Keeping this in mind, the Excess has a slightly larger than average diameter at 57mm which was necessary to hit the inertia targets I had in mind.
In order to keep the weight at the target of 65g it was necessary to trim as much excess (hehe) material from the profile and cup of the yoyo as possible. SS is able to be machined as thin as .5mm (as seen in the SS Koi and Bowl 303) but I worried that simply pushing the material to its limits would result in a less durable final product that had much higher b-grade rates. Instead, I chose to have slightly thicker walls and optimize the hub as much as possible to reduce center weight. This is not to say that the Excess has much weight in the walls, as it is machined thin enough to have a weight distribution similar to that of a 7000 series aluminum yoyo.
The areas that saw the most changes between the prototype and the production versions were the hub and the interface between the rim and the user’s hand. The hub on the proto Excess has a spike to house an 8mm axle and was flat everywhere else. This design allowed for a massive reduction in centerweight compared to a flat or domed hub, but didn’t match the rest of the design’s smooth curves aesthetically, and needed to be smoothed out for the production. In addition, the main issue that people had with the prototype was the sharpness of the rim. The round organic rims of the Excess are able to pack on a lot of rim weight whilst remaining thin, but the prototype was simply too sharp for a polished final product. To remedy this, the radius of the rim was increased, with an undercut to keep the overall weight down. All in all, these changes moved the weight more towards the rim and the center of the yoyo which increased maneuverability at the expense of a very small amount of power.
In play, the Excess feels familiar, like an extremely optimized Aluminum mono, but the material truly elevates it to something special. It is not only achingly beautiful, all smooth curves and shine, but sounds entirely different to any other yoyo out there. The density of SS creates a much lower tone than aluminum or even Titanium, and truly needs to be experienced in person to be appreciated.
Thank you so much to those who pre-ordered and allowed this project to become a reality. I cannot wait to continue to push the limits of what people think is possible with stainless steel.
Cheers.
Diameter: 57mm
Width: 46mm
Weight: 65g
