“Saint Eel” Pre-Production by ILOVEYOYO

Reviewed by Christopher Rhoads 8/2/09

Introduction
This review is late. I planned on having it up a week ago but I needed more time with the Saint Eel. It truly is a different beast from anything I have ever thrown before. For one thing it is my first steel yo-yo. Also, it is my first foray into the realm of the micro yo-yo (those that are under 45 millimeters in diameter). Finally, it is my first yo-yo from German manufacturer ILOVEYOYO (ILYY for short). Before the yo-yo arrived from Germany, home of many great things such as bratwurst, the Audi R8, and my ancestors, I read up on other yo-yos in the micro category. Most of them seemed to be more of a novelty and less of a day-to-day carry. Will the Saint Eel fall into the same trappings as the majority of the micro market or will it rise up to become the patron saint of small yo-yos everywhere?

Specs
Weight: 59g
Width: 30.85mm
Diameter: 41.10mm
Gap: 4mm
Bearing: KMK S-Size (5x11x5mm)
Response: sILYYcone

Look and Feel
ILYY is definitely a class act when it comes to packaging and presentation. My Saint Eel came in a well crafter green velour bag with an ILOVEYOYO sticker and pin. Way more than the standard box that most yo-yos come in nowadays.
Obviously the first thing anyone is going to notice about this yo-yo is how small it is. The Saint Eel is absolutely tiny compared to even my smallest yo-yos. It makes my M1 and Swirly look like they have a thyroid problem when set next to them.
After I carefully extracted the yo-yo from the pouch and overcame my initial shock due to its size, I began to inspect the yo-yo. While it may be small it still has the many of the features I look for in any yo-yo. A couple of them being a nice ceramic blast finish to it and an IGR for thumb grinds. The best way to describe the ceramic blast finish on this steel yo-yo is that feels like the midway point between One Drop’s soda blasting and General-Yo’s bead blasting finish. Upon further inspection you can tell that ILYY has put a lot of thought into the design of this yo-yo. They went so far as to mask off part of the surface on the outside of the bearing seat and response area in order to make sure it did not eat string. The steel did not feel that much different to the touch from your average aluminum yo-yo but it sure does sound different. While spinning, the Saint Eel has a completely different note to it. I know part of it is because of the size, but most of my aluminum yo-yos, no matter what the size, sound similar.

Weight
This yo-yo is the lightest metal I have ever thrown. Now I know what you are thinking, “Dude, it’s a micro. Of course it is light” and normally I would be right there with you. The strange thing is that while it is light, it feels “just right” for its size. It feels like a full size yo-yo that was shrunk down. The weight is distributed evenly so it has a good spin time and is incredibly stable. I say good spin time and not great because there were a couple of times that it lost inertia while performing long combos, but it never lost its spin during single tricks. Normally I would ding a yo-yo for spinning out during a three trick combo but I can forgive the Saint Eel. The fact that it is able to perform so well while being so small is an amazing feat.

Response and Bearing
The Saint Eel comes with the most amazing silicone job I have ever seen on a yo-yo. It is this bright orange silicone (dubbed sILLYcone by ILYY) that is perfectly applied to the guts of the yo-yo. This response gives snappy, perfect binds pretty much every time. The only downside to the sILLYcone is the fact that after it wears out I am going to have to go to standard flowable silicone. I would love to get a hold of a tube of sILLYcone from ILYY some day, but I don’t know if they offer it to the general public

.The bearing that came with the Saint Eel is a KMK S-Sized metric bearing which looks almost identical to a standard D-Sized bearing. It gives a nice spin time and is pretty quiet to boot. I have yet to deshield the bearing because the shields are press fit into it and I do not want to damage the internals.

Playability
This yo-yo is going to infuriate you if you have never used a micro yo-yo before. The first five minutes of play had me wanting to rip my hair out and throw this thing through a wall. I missed trick after trick after trick while throwing the Saint Eel, tricks that I normally hit with ease. Instead of giving up on it, I took a deep breath and gave it another go. After a little more time throwing it, I began to get use to the size and started hitting more tricks. I would say after about an hour of solid play I was back to normal and hitting most things with ease. Like I said up above, the weight of this yo-yo means that it will spin out on you during longer combos on occasion. I noticed that if I threw it a little harder than I normally throw I could compensate a little for the size and give some extra spin. The ceramic blast finish gives some great grinds in the hand, up the arm, and on the finger. An added bonus is that the IGR allows for perfect thumb grinds, even on my sausage like thumbs. Being such a small and light yo-yo means that it is easily whipped around on the string. The last thing I have to mention about the Saint Eel is that it has helped my accuracy quite a bit. I started doing Eli Hops with the Saint Eel and I would miss them quite frequently. After practicing a little bit I began to hit three and four in a row with it. When I went back to my bigger yo-yos I noticed that I was catching hops with ease and hitting up to ten in a row. Eli Hops have never been one of my strong tricks so this is an accomplishment for me.

Final Thoughts
This yo-yo is not for everyone. It will aggravate and test the patience of anyone who is not prepared for the size. Even with that being said, I would strongly encourage anyone that has a chance to throw one to do just that. Give it a try and you will probably end up loving it in the end. I know I do. This is a great little throw to carry around with you. It is small enough that I carry it in my pocket pretty much anywhere I go. Half the time I forget that it is in my pocket. The Saint Eel is truly a fun and unique throw that deserves a spot in any serious throwers collection. Frank O. of ILYY stated that he wanted to make a micro yo-yo that played like its regular sized counterparts, in that I would say he succeeded.
There is one thing that must be said about the Saint Eel. The yo-yo reviewed above is a preproduction model meaning that the features and specs can still change. A good example is that the original prototypes weighed 68 grams. I would love to get my hands on one of them just so I can compare the two; I have a feeling that the 68 gram model is going to feel a little too heavy for the size.