Ice Cube

A few months ago I was talking to Jared over ZOOOOOOM about a new yoyo setup I was working on for a collaboration project with a friend who has a yoyo company. I was making him a new delrin yoyo which you’ll hear more details about it when it comes out in the next month or so!

Anyway, delrin yoyos feel nice due to their smooth and relatively soft surface, but threads in delrin, and even a delrin bearing seat are mediocre. To fix this I designed the yoyo to essentially be a delrin sandwich which is clamped between two aluminum pieces, a threaded axle/hub, and a bearing seat.

I realized that with this setup, I could basically make any terrible material into a yoyo, and so Jared jokingly said I should make an ice yoyo.

I took it seriously and made them.

I ordered some Smooth-on Oomoo silicone to make the mold for the ice. I wanted a flexible mold due to the expansion of water as it freezes, and for easy demolding. In order to make the flexible mold though I had to make a mold for my mold. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to designing molds so it was just a simple press-fit DLP printed mold which worked fine.

Here’s the first ice mold

At first I tried using a combination of a rigid top that clamped onto the soft silicone mold to have a more complicated hub

Here’s a cross section of the mold.

Unfortunately the ice just stuck to the rigid mold and I ended up with some ice chips instead of a yoyo

Another interesting thing I found was that our freezer is not level. I had to shim the mold when putting it in the freezer to compensate for this.

As for fixing the ice sticking to the mold, I changed the design to just utilize the soft portion of the mold, and with a little analysis to make sure my very uneven, unconcentric yoyo wouldn’t wobble, I made my first ice yoyo!

It worked fine until it melted after a few minutes but I wasn’t satisfied. Plus I had a pretty good pun in mind. I decided to make the Ice Cube.

I made a new very similar mold which reused the ring from the last silicone mold mold.

Definitely the first, and probably the last square ice yoyo.

Overall I’m glad I did this project just to do it once, but I don’t see much promise in ice yoyos and will likely not pursue them ever again. Getting sprayed with melting yoyo is rather unpleasant.