With the advent of all these new bead tricks (e.g. ), I think it's time for someone to come up with some special tamas and beads designed for this. Stacking bearings and beads work, but I think we can do better. It takes some fiddling around to find a setup where the bead pops out consistently. These tamas could be specialized like some yoyo's are designed especially for 5A. It could have like a heavier larger bead (maybe like a fishing weight?) and a larger string hole for the string to slide easily out. One might even design a counter sink for the bead to sit in during regular tricks-- perhaps with some sort of rubber gasket to lock the bead in until you pop it out. Is anyone working on anything like this?
Fishing weights do work and in some cases opening up the string hole a bit, ~2mm, and making sure it is deburred helps with the string moving through it. I've thought about finding a really small die like a micro version of the 5A rigs but they're too light, not much more than a bead by the time you drill them. Maybe I could grind down a fishing weight to a cube and put dots on it. 2mm drill bit
I think this matches what you're talking about. Using an Astrojax counterweight instead of a bead to attach the tama. I feel like the string would come out constantly and you'd be locked into this play style but still a very interesting way of play! I'd also like to see this with a modern size kendama rather than the small/toyish version in this video.