The Rigid Yo-Yo
This
is one of those potty ideas we all get. Then
we spend ages trying to get the darned thing
to work. In this case, I'm happy to say, the
laugh it gets makes it worthwhile.
This
is what I wanted to do. I wanted to work a yo-yo
up and down in the accepted style. Then I thought
when it reached the nadir it would be funny
if you could have the cord go stiff and then
raise the yo-yo up in the air on the cord.
The
obvious answer was the Rigid Rope Trick allied
with a very light yo-yo. The first one was made
out of paper just to see if it would work on
the rope. It did. Then I searched for a strong
light material which would allow me to pack
the prop and have a fair chance of arriving
with it intact. In the back of my mind was a
friend who made a wonderful huge floating ball
by sticking tissue paper around a balloon and
then deflating the balloon. The first show he
took it to he put it carefully into a large
air-line bag ... and fell up the stairs of the
hall on top of it. I always felt I lost a friend
when he told me about it and I fell about laughing.
Balsa
wood was the first thought I had. I laboriously
cut a yo-yo out of Balsa ... I wanted a big
one. It was altogether too heavy. Finally, I
found what I needed. It was the expanded polystyrene
they use to pack things. Cutting it cleanly
was accomplished by winding a bit of wire around
a soldering iron tip and then extending it to
give a hot length of wire which cut through
the polystyrene. That gave me two circles of
a light-weight substance. I glued a dowel of
1-1/2" round Balsa in the centre between the
two and discovered I couldn't get down to the
dowel to attach the rigid rope. I had to break
one of the circles and fasten on the rope end
and then make another circular side to go on.
You've
got to be careful that you fasten the right
part of the rigid rope to the spindle. The rope
has got to be at the right angle to wind around
the spindle so that the yo-yo goes up and down
and, finally, stops at the bottom. Sometimes
it will only jerk back up a short bit but it
is enough to let the audience see it is meant
to be a yo-yo. You can only take it up to the
horizontal, let it suddenly drop and then wind
the cord around the spindle again.
I made
one for a comic who works a lot of stags. I
won't tell you what he does with it - but it
doe s get him a lot of laughs!
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