OOAK Table Tennis Forum

A person after my own heart - uses hobby shop wood. He didn't mention 1/64" birch ply, it is available. 3 plies of wood, 0.4mm total thickness. There's also 0.6mm bass ply (from China) available in Australia, and a domestic 1.5mm Hoop Pine plywood as well. Since I hate wasting wood, instead of gluing two pieces of 6 inch wide balsa together I use one piece 3" wide the length of the blade and another shorter piece split in half which is glued onto the sides of the longer piece. Less waste. His estimate of the speed of my old 1/4" balsa + 1/32" birch face blades is right on - OFF to OFF+.

Iskandar

Ok here is screenshot of my metal template cutted with laser
And underneath is my next blade in state of progres ....
This time i have used the birch ply on the top ... balsa core is now 3,5 mm and now when i compute right it is 9 ply wood
And feel realy good ... and it has only 6.5 mm thicknes.
This one is for young club player ... so i will have review from him and his trainer.
Hope i make you happy with this birch ply from hobby shop Iskandar
I have it long time ago ... but it is not looking so nice. So this is first time i use it.

Ok here it is ...
It has 84 grams.
Hope to hear good review from the trainer and player


And here is the side 6.4mm 9ply wood

Ok ... The test with player and Trainer has gone well .
The trainer just says wow ,and give it mark off- with great big sweet spot ,great spin and control .
But he also has one complain which is reasonable about the shape.
The bottom part needs to be reshaped he told ...to much thick at the bottom, and none is playing with the bottom part he told, which sounds reasonable. So i will adjust the shape ,because i think he is right . And also it will be lighter then.
And also i`m changing the process of pressing the veneers together to get better flat surface. One friend is creating a new presser which will decompose the pressure more equal to each part .

And i forgot to mention the wood i have used for this one :
0,8mm 3 ply birch , 0.6mm Mahogany, 2,0+1.5 glued together Balsa , 0.6mm Mahogany , 0,8mm 3 ply birch

Robert

Where did you find 0.8mm 3 ply poplar??? The thinnest I've seen in hobby stores is 3mm poplar - the 0.8mm ply is usually birch. Poplar would be a lot softer. The blade shape looks a lot like those Re-impact blades. Supposedly has less resistance to air so you can swing harder!

Iskandar

Thanks iskandar ...
I was once more in the hobby shop to ask if it is real poplar ply ,and they said it was mistake ... it is as you are writing the 0.8mm 3 ply birch.
Once more thanks .. have to repair the information .
Robert

It would be nice if it were available! Other interesting face plywoods would be the 3 ply 0.4mm birch and there is also a 0.6mm 3 ply basswood available from an Ausralian mail order place.

Iskandar

O nice thanks iskandar ...
Here are final photos of the blade which was the reason i started to crete blades .. Hope you will like them
Its is a 1st place price for the tournament Winner in our local pub.

Robert

Wow,

Beautiful. I especially like the logo/signature on the handle with the DATE! I think blade manufacturers should date all blades by manufacturer date just like that. So people can compare blades by date when in the club. Like wine drinkers compare years for wine.

This would also help deal with the variances in batches, for example, the different generations of Pf4 and NSD blades. They evolved and play differently throughout the decades.

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I'll second that. WOW!!!! Very curious about how you routed the signature into the handle. By hand? Using a template? CNC router?

Iskandar

O thanks you both ...
I`m not sure about the process of routing .. but i have to deploy vectors so i`m thinking it was done somehow with some kind of cnc machine.
It has been done by one goldsmith (which is also playing table tennis ). so maybe some special cnc machine for this purposes.
Robert

Hi
Here i have a request for help with my last blade project.
I'm making a new blade with carbon layers inside ...
All looks really promising ,but i have one big problem with leakage of the epoxy
I`m using a CHS EPOXY 324 which has worked so far on another project connected with carbon .
Do you have any ideas or something which can help me to avoid this leakage of epoxy thru top ply?
Here some screenshots from the leaks.


Thanks Robert

Wow.. can't say I've had that problem before. What's the top ply? The leakage is probably due to it's thickness and the type of wood. I wonder if filling the eopxy with fumed silica (West Systems 406) or microballoons (West Systems 407) might help. Or I wonder if putting some sort of lacquer under the ply before doing the layup might work to seal the pores.

Another idea would be to lay up the carbon cloth on the core, cure it in a vacuum bag with a mylar sheet or peel ply on top of it and then apply the top ply to the cured sandwich later. You'd only need the barest amount of epoxy for that if you use a vacuum bag or some other way to exert high pressure on the sandwich while it's curing.

What's the carbon fiber? 6K cloth? Looks quite thick.

Iskandar

The idea of sealing the top layer with lacqer sound promising and also the idea to glue first the core with the carbon sounds good.
I will try it next time.
The top ply is mahagony .6 mm thick. And the carbon cloth is .2 mm thick 160g/m2 .
Now i have brushed the top layers with sand paper and it looks good but the charasteristic of the wood is gone. So next time i will try it this way with the sealing of the top ply.
Thanks

There's also the possibility of burying the carbon deeper in the blade (under two layers of wood, closer to the center). Supposedly makes the blade a little "softer" - Butterfly does this with their "Innerforce" blades, and first did it with their (IIRC) Gergely Carbon way back when. At least, they advertised it as being a more moderate sort of carbon blade.

Iskandar