On a Quest to make Wooden Yoyos

I managed to bumble, curse, slip, crack, and shave my way to custom wooden yoyos for my kids.

If you want to read how I did this, skip to below. Otherwise you can watch the successful version here.

But why make wooden yoyos at all?

I’ve been on a sort of spiritual journey the last half year. It boils down to me needing some sort of healthy outlet which isn’t working or being a dad.

My wife is a lovely lady who is full of good ideas. She knows what makes kids happy and especially what ours will be interested in. The projects that I’ve been working on fall into two distinct categories: Upgrades for our house and Toys for our kids. At the behest of my wife, a few weeks back I made a Hula Hoop which was a big success technically, but not so much with the girls. Yoyos was suggested and I thought and thought about how to tackle them.

Yoyos at their most simple really boil down to a central axis and two inwards facing oblong spheroids with flat face, or outwards facing cups with flat faces. In my head I wanted to be able to make these fancy shapes, and this meant using a tool that I don’t have or have access to: a lathe. I’ve never touched a real one, and have zero experience with them.

That didn’t stop me from trying to make one out of a drill though:

It was a disaster. Seriously, I spent a solid week of evenings and early mornings tinkering and changing and failing. In the end I just gave up, edited a video and put it out (to much laughter among some woodworking communities around the web).

I did get a bunch of constructive feedback from some people, though. I’m so, so grateful for this.

Specifically for the Drill Press Lathe it was that according to the diameter of the workpiece and the task at hand, you have to spin your workpiece at a specific RPM. This is something so basic and obvious that I totally didn’t take it into account. I think that a lot of the carving issues that I ran into were simply that the drill spins way too fast for what I was trying to do.

It’s this feedback that I think is critical to being able to make better and better gadgets as I get more skilled in these types of crafts.

Very often you don’t know what you need to know until you start doing a thing.

About self-learning and how interesting the actual process is

Recently on DesignerNews someone asked about how people learn and I thought this question was really interesting as it is something that I think about a lot.

I think that self-learning is about two things: Immersion and Asking Questions.

Immersion

When I start learning something I just dive into and it becomes my world. I read everything I can on it. I watch videos, and I listen to lectures. I find podcasts. It fills up my time (well, whatever working and being a partner and parent leaves) completely. I found that what this process is actually doing is filling my head with all sorts of “component details” and “category specific vocabulary” which I need to know to be able to grok the topic I’m trying to learn. This was especially true for development and for woodworking because they are these esoteric fields which are so broad and so complex that without some sort of context it is easy to get lost in them.

Asking Questions

Being capable of formulating questions and finding answers is really about breaking ideas down into parts and finding the right place to get the knowledge to fill in the gaps. Often this is simply google. When it isn’t, it can be specialty forums (reddit is great for this as they literally have a subreddit for everything under the sun) and old-style forums on the internet. Some knowledge is physical and you have to have someone show you. Welding is like this, in that you can watch videos and read manuals, but without a knowledgeable hand guiding you it will be a painful journey (seriously, get someone to show you).

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, please join me over at ClickClackClunk.