Rainier - Boosted

Description

The Rainier started with the idea of scaling up a Cascade and shifting the weight out to the rim and turned into a performance monster. It was one of our first “Dark Side” yo-yos and among our best performing models. It seemed natural to make a Boosted version.

“Boosting” is making a 6061 alloy yo-yo out of 7075 alloy, but changing the design so that the overall weight ends up being lower, even though 7075 is a heavier alloy than 6061. It takes a lot of tweaking to the design to make this happen, but we like to do it in a way that yo-yo looks the same and has the same or similar specs (except for the weight). Given that 7075 is a heavier alloy, if we took the same design of a 6061 yo-yo and produced it in 7075, it would end up about 2.5 grams heavier. We have done this in the past and called it “GZR Edition”. Turns out to be not as interesting as Boosted because the weight distribution is the same so it plays very similarly. Changing the weight distribution is how to make the feel in play change which is why we do Boosted and not GZR when we make a 7075 version of a 6061 model.

The Rainier is optimized for rim weight at essentially the limits of 6061 alloy. We have a hard limit on what we consider the thinnest we can make the body. We can safely go thinner with 7075 alloy which is what we did: thinned out the body and added rim weight while maintaining the same profile shape. The result is a yoyo with considerably more rim weight, but a total weight of about .5 grams less (or about 3 grams less than if we just ran the same design in 7275 - see above). The Boosted Rainier is further into the Dark Side than the original. It’s even more of an extreme design.