As you can see in the video, the spring floats and operates perfectly! Moments before this video was taken, we put a fresh set of 10s on this Fly Classic, and balanced the spring in the usual way. My friend and colleague @Fiona has led our team toward creating a new spring recipe through which we've achieved a bainite microstructure—this yields a more fatigue-resistant spring! This spring used in this demo video was made and treated entirely in-house in our lab and facilities at WPI using new tooling that our team designed, and the design has been informed by our research efforts and analysis of existing Fly springs over the past few years.
We have a lot of information to share in the weeks and months ahead, which will hopefully answer many of the questions many of us have had about Fly springs past and present. For the moment, I think we can all celebrate moment this as a win for our community! You can never hold back springs!
Thanks for all the encouragement and support along the way. For fun, here's a video of two of our student Lab RATs taking the springs out of the furnace and quenching them in oil as part of our heat treatment protocol:
Operating the vibrato, to me, feels exactly as it does on my other Flys, and we can even see a similar number of threads on the threaded rod in the back while setting the spring up—we'll have more data to speak to this soon. We're also in the process of making more spring prototypes with this recipe for others in our community to try out, but if you find yourself near central Massachusetts on Saturday 4/6, we'll have this very Fly and the new spring out and about as part of our FX Hackathon event if you'd like to try playing it for yourself!
