The top I used was the Premier Junior. It's one of my favorite tops. It does not come with an indentation or dimple on the crown like the Saturno. But I found an easy and accurate way to put one on any top with a smooth flat crown. If you want to make one yourself, here’s how I do it: spin the top on a table and have it spinning upright and still. Take a marking pen like a Sharpie, and make a quick delicate jab at where you think the exact center of the crown is. When you pick up the top and look at its crown it will have or should have a perfect circle drawn on it by the marker. Then use a small drill bit to manually drill and carve out an indentation. Since it’s metal on plastic you can easily just do it by hand. Just make sure you don’t “drill” it all the way through the plastic. The entire process takes less than 5 minutes. If the circle is very tiny it will be very easy to put the dimple at the exact center. But if your estimation of the center or aim with the Sharpie was way off then you might have a larger circle. You can still spin it again and try again with the marking pen and hopefully get another circle inside the larger one.
Also, if you balanced a top with adhesive putty and use the above method to find the “dimple” then you should not re-balance the top because doing so will change the center of rotation and the dimple you first made will not be the center of rotation anymore.
The only person I remember showing and explaining this method to was Jon Gates a long time ago.
As I was typing this I suddenly remembered another way I prepared the top for the toothpick trick. I came up with this method so that I could instantly do the toothpick trick with any borrowed top or any top with a hole through the center of the crown such as the cheap Duncan Imperial or those with raised letterings like the Monarch. Basically I just made a removable adapter. I use a plastic disc about the size of a nickel or dime that you can find at almost all school supply stores (I think they use them for games or for teaching counting) and put an indentation on it just like I did for the tops. Then use removable adhesive putty and stick the disc on the top of the crown. Then thru trial and error you can to readjust the position of the disc so the indentation is at the exact center of rotation.
Some of you may remember I gave a few of these made up discs to top players I met at one of the yo-yo meets many years ago.
By just playing around I very pleasantly discovered that by just using a small loop of string you can easily and elegantly get the top off the toothpick as shown in that little video above which I think was made about 15 years ago.
I first saw Rick Osborne do the toothpick trick. I never met Rick in person. But when I first started out in tops he sent me some tops and a videotape in which he did that trick plus a few others such as throwing the top way, way up high and catching it back on the string.
There are not many tops that come with a dimple on top because I think it’s so difficult to manufacture something so precisely balanced. Even car tires and ceiling fans come with balancing kits. So I was surprised that the Saturno tops have them. I was able to play with them when my friend visited her sister in Spain a few months ago and she was able to bring back a bunch of them for me. I guess they are manufactured with enough precision that they can take the chance that the dimple will be at the center when the top is spinning.
The very first top I bought also had a dimple on the crown. I bought it in Detroit in 1974. I clearly remember the year because I was visiting my home town of Dearborn, Michigan that year. It’s a plastic top with a metal ball shaped tip. I got it from a novelty store thinking it was something that may be fun to play with in the future. But I never played with it because although the printed instructions were enticing, they were too vague.
