Anodized art

In all humbleness, our anodizing capabilities are among the best out there. In spite of this, I find it worthwhile to push our skills further and share some of our findings. See below.

Tigorylla 513, NVx Cafe (single piece), Shinya's signature CUT, Yellow H2O

The possibilities with anodizing are nearly endless. At the end of the day, you put raw aluminum in a chemical bath that reacts with the surface and depending on what you mix into the solution, the color changes. By making sure that some areas of the surface remain "raw" before being put in contact with a second solution with a different color, one can do multi-color effects. All of which very nice.

Even though they look nice, my senses have been overstimulated with splash anodizing. Some of our colleagues in the industry have done remarkable work in this area (Tom Kuhn in 1990, CLYW in 2006 I blieve to remember, YYF in 2008 and a few more deserve credit here).

Here are a few things we have been experimenting with:

Tiger look
(paint masking stripes with a brush by hand >> anodize >> wash off >> anodize again)
Already known from our Tigorylla 513, we have produced hand-made tiger patterns, applied with a brush and two tones of anodizing. Extremly nice look. We will release the updated Gorylla 411 in early 2010 and might give some of the raw halves we have the tiger look. Not all of them. Too expensive. The default Gorylla 411 will be single color.

Brush effect
(brush with masking gel >> anodize >> wash off >> anodize again)
This is actually a suggestion by our anodizer. It looks as if someone "brushed" over the surface. They named it the "Cafe", so here is a one of a kind NVX Cafe. Extremy nice two-tone look.

Marble
(splash with mask >> anodize >> wash off >> anodize again)
One might call this a micro splash effect. Shinya used it in his very own limited edition CUT yoyo (contact us... *very* few left). Very nice effect that turned out better than intended.

Laser etching
(anodize >> laser >> anodize again)
We tried this in a very subtle way with the second batch of H2O yoyos. By lasering an anodize yoyos, you expose very fine and controllable areas of the bare aluminum again, which allows you to anodize those areas). So in principle, some of the suggestions by our fans are technically possible. Just costly.. so we need to see when/if we do this one day.

Nice! No? :)

So... we keep working on it. Unfortunately, all the above works are cumbersome manual labor, which is something very expensive in Switzerland. With the above effects, cost for a yoyo could easily double. That is of course not always feasible. So we need to take a small hit every now and then in support of a gorgeous looking yoyo, but also... quantities will be low. So we can't do this as often as we want.

Thanks,
Chris