From RSO: I first spoke to Russell Andert, the maker of the dert and its various iterations, in November 2020. After a few back and forths, a Zoom conversation followed and he agreed to collaborate with RSO after I pitched to him my vision for the collaboration.

Russell is a machinist himself and one hell of a genius yo-yo designer. Back in the day, he machined his yo-yos using leftover metal bars using a CNC mill. Conversely, other brands tended to make their yo-yos on a CNC lathe. What is the difference, you might ask? Put simply, the cutting tool moves in a mill while the raw material moves in a lathe. With the raw material turning, it is much easier to make a perfectly concentric yo-yo. Making a playable yo-yo on a mill is a challenging endeavour, but he made some amazing yoyos.

From the start, we were in agreement that we would do a titanium yo-yo and to stick to the minimalist design philosophy of the dert series. Choosing which model to remake in titanium took us a while due to the number of models he had made, but we eventually settled on the mid-sized OG dert.

The standard dert shape essentially consists of a single arc at the catch zone and another arc in the hub joined with a straight line at the rims. Even the signature dert nipple is a simple cylindrical shape. We modernized the response groove and also felt that some weight reduction (we decided on about 63g) would make the yo-yo play better. I thinned down the walls of the dert CAD Russell sent me to arrive at the derti design. Fun fact: Russell had himself made a small run of 4 titanium versions of the dert back in the day, but it weighed 72g and is unacceptable by today’s standards.

We were extremely pleased with the prototypes and did not make any design changes to the production version. The resultant yo-yo plays in a sweet spot between floaty and solid. I would go further and say that is the best playing RSO to date. You would have to throw it to realise the beauty in its simplistic design!