A very interesting thread. I clearly remember my impression the first time I saw the Monarch tops. Up till then the only tops I knew were the snap cap Imperial Duncan tops. I think it was in the early 90’s when I first met Don Olney at his hotel when he was traveling somewhere in California. I was traveling a lot during those times and was fortunate enough to meet up with him. I remember Don opening his suitcase and dumping everything on the bed and my eyes just popped at all the bright neon pastel colored tops that covered the bed. That was the first time I ever saw any quantity peg tops other than the Duncan tops and it was instantly obvious that they were a whole level above the Duncan tops in quality.
But I didn’t play with the Monarch for long though. They didn’t feel as fast and maneuverable as the Duncans and I thought the points should have been made with a different plastic because the string didn’t seem to take well with those points. And if you threw them really hard for a fast spin (and when I say hard I mean like fast ball hard) the points would burn your palm. They just didn’t spin as long as the Duncans and I felt they were unnecessarily heavy. On top of that they also had a slight unpleasant smell from the butyrate (I think) type plastic used. Of course it was also possible I was too ingrained on the Duncan Imperials by then. I could do all the tricks with the snap cap Duncans. Although most likely that was also because I had always used a thinner size and weight string for the lighter weight Duncan so that it spun longer as you catch, flipped, and twirled the top around on the string. So for me at that time the Duncans were light and fast and the Monarchs were slow and clunky. And later Don packaged them with a flashy eye catching bright neon yellow nylon strings which just didn’t make sense to me at all. You practically couldn’t regenerate the top with the nylon strings because of the lack of friction between the point and the string (although you could by using a “tourniquet” or “choke” type of technique) and you couldn’t safely throw super hard because you never knew when the top would unpredictably slip or snag on the soft, thin nylon string. And I also remember that after a while the yellow dye from the string would leach out and stain whatever it had been touching leaving the string white. But it didn’t matter at the time since hardly anyone was interested in regenerating or throwing hard anyways. If they were they would have intuitively used the proper weight string. The Monarchs were beautiful, colorful, solid looking, and a truly all American top.
Later Don remade them with a different plastic. For one thing they didn’t smell any more. But then he also completely changed the top points. I never asked him why he changed the top points. I thought he could have kept the same shape but sharpen the tips more so they wouldn’t burn your palm. His redesigned points seemed to be of harder plastic and the very sharp tip was pretty neat because it could spin for a very long time on a hard surface. But I thought the rest of the shape of the tip, to put it bluntly, was pretty bad and should have been done differently. It was obvious whoever designed it only knew how to throw a top on the floor or onto their hands but never played much with it on a string. I was glancing at the Monarch photos by Pulp and was surprised to see the elegant shaped point on the Monarch because I don’t remember a Monarch with those points. However, a closer reading showed Pulp turned those points himself. He may have just taken the Olney tip and re-modified it. But in one of the photos you can see the entire original Don Olney tip (lying horizontally in the photo) and see that the notch is too shallow, too angular, and too sharp.
When somebody comes out with a new spin top I always look at the points. Looking at the point will tell you whether the top maker is an advanced player or not; unless he just copies the standard Duncan tip. In fact, in the late 80’s when Charlie Penton decided he wanted to make some large size wood tops for us he also made a metal point for it and like all first time top makers the point ended up looking like just a shallow angular “notch”, much like the Olney tips for the Monarchs. It was as if making the point was just an afterthought, which it most likely was. But then Charlie didn’t know any top tricks that involve using the string a lot and he was not aware about using the string to regenerate spin on a top. So if you look at the silhouette of his top point the notch was either too shallow, too angular and not rounded out, or with no “throat” to the point, or in most instances all of these shortcomings. As a result, too much of the point’s surface area ends up touching the string, or actually digging into the string, as it was spinning and so instantly slowing down the top. And when the Spintastic tops first came out their points were also like that, i.e. the notch was on the shallow side with sharp corners and angles not rounded out. But it was understandable since Dale at that time hardly did any spin top string tricks and wasn’t anywhere near as good with the top as he is now. I made the same suggestion to Dale and later to the other new top makers: just copy the shape of the “Casper” or “Character” top point which I thought were ideal. But nobody took the advice. At one point in time I turned a few points out of wood dowels using a drill press and plugged them in the tops which worked pretty well as long as you didn’t throw them on the ground and blunt them. Later Dale said he took my advice and added a little throat to the Spintastic top point but strangely he still kept the notch at right angles rather than smoothing and rounding out the angles to make a traditional looking point like the Duncans, the early Monarchs, and practically all the Latin-American plastic tops. As a result the top couldn’t spin as long and freely on the string as it would have because the flange or notch of the top point was still rubbing against the string and robbing the top of its spin. So the cheap, low quality, much maligned Duncan Imperial snap cap tops could still out spin and out trick them all. (Of course, to be fair you had to balance and fix them up first. But that’s another story.) If you look you see the same examples with all the first time top makers. For another example, a few years ago I found some spin tops from China in an Asian market that were obviously Premier brand rip-offs. I call them Premier rip offs because the packaging and graphics were almost identical to the Mexican Premier packaging. So I’m guessing Premier might have had a promotion a few years ago in China and the Far East. Anyways, the top bodies seemed identical to the Mexican top but the tips were so bad that the tops were practically unplayable despite the fact that the top body looked and felt identical to the Mexican version. The tips were too stubby: the notches of the tips were too small, no “throat”, too angular, etc. My point (?) is to show again that whoever made these points had no experience doing string tricks with a top. The only thing you could do with these tops were to throw them on the floor and watch it spin. On the other hand, Walter Watt’s tops have very nicely designed “spears” to them and looking at it you just instinctively knew that whoever made them was a very experienced and expert spin top player. There’s something about a properly shaped and fitted point that invites you to try it.
If I seem to be making a big deal out of the points it’s because I think the point of a top together with the proper string is critical in making even a bad top into a good one. The top point is like the heart and soul of a string tricking top. More emphasis seemed to be placed on the spin top body like the shape, the weight, material, etc., than on the string and point. I think any top can play much better if fitted with the proper point and string. Even the cheap lowly Duncan Imperial can be a formidable top.
By the way, in case anyone is curious, I haven’t used the Duncan Imperials for many years. One reason might be that I got tired of using a string that I couldn’t use on other plastic tops.
But getting back to the Monarchs, my later generation Monarchs didn’t go to waste. I found that because of the different plastic material used I could make good whistling tops out of them and they whistled for a long time (I think almost a minute?) because of the extra sharp point which allowed for a much longer spin.
By the way, I don’t mean to criticize Don Olney in any way. He may not have been aware of it but I’ve always been pretty grateful to Don over those early years as he provided me different types of tops and he always generously shared his wealth of interesting information about tops as well as giving me any leads he had about tops and people who spun and collect them. I followed up on almost all of those leads and I don’t think he realizes the results of the different paths he opened for me and I’m sure to others. And I admired the way he still kept producing peg tops even though at the time I figured he most probably wasn’t making much, if any, profits from them.
Herman
