OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I have been browsing to a lot of advertisement and stumbled in a blade for sale. It is a viscaria and top ply has fish scale pattern. Although used, it is more expensive compared to a regular viscaria blade.

Is a brand new fish scale blade more expensive than a brand new regular blade? Is the speed really faster and consistent? If so, why?

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Enjoy the game. It is a never ending learning experience once you play and keep the ball on that 45 sq ft of space or should I say half of that space.

Yes I've seen this before... I don't think it's anymore expensive from the manufacturer, but dealers may charge extra if they think it's special and in high demand.

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ttnpp in particular was selling these for more.

http://ttnpp.com/store/home/818-butterf ... ia--7.html

Seems to be out of stock, though. As you'll notice in the blurb, "less than 10%" of Viscarien have this grain pattern on the face plies, they pull them out of stock and slap a higher price on them. This sort of figure is what aeromodellers call "C grain" or "quarter grain" and is the result of that particular piece of wood being cut in a radial direction to the log it came from (i.e. "quarter sawn" (the opposite being a tangential cut, or "A grain"). A piece of quarter grain wood has the annual rings perpendicular to it's surface, is stiffer, isn't prone to warping when it shrinks, but does have a tendency to split when subjected to bending in the direction perpendicular to the grain. Violin sound boards and good quality one ply hinoki blades are all quarter grain (though you don't see the "fish scale" with these because spruce and hinoki are softwoods rather than hardwoods).

Of course, whether or not "fish scale" Viscarien play any better, or even have different properties, than regular Viscarien, I'll leave for the Viscaria experts to comment on, I have absolutely no idea. It might just be marketing hype. Just based on what's been posted on ooak in the past, Viscarien differ quite a bit from example to example, some are "good", some are "not so good". As I remarked in the past, you'd think that something called a "Viscera" (er, "Viscaria") would have more to do with the inside of a fish than the outside!

Iskandar

I've had 3 TBS, 2 with and 1 without the scale grain pattern. One (with pattern) was clearly better than the other two.
Also had 2 viscaria, both with - one was ok, one not as ok.
I also did not like the feel of a tbs alc I had either. No pattern.

My verdict? The pattern doesn't make any difference - placebo effect. What is probably more telling in my opinion - the 'nicer' playing blades were much older - with the old pin badge on the handle - and manufactured/purchased much closer to when they were first announced. These blades actually hit the advertised weight back then.

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Chasse Patate

So its more of a marketing hype? It maybe rare ( I don't know if 10% is considered rare ) but does not give extra in terms of performance. But I agree that the older blades are better.

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Enjoy the game. It is a never ending learning experience once you play and keep the ball on that 45 sq ft of space or should I say half of that space.

I think it was more of a forum hype than marketing - and some savvy shops picked up on people willing to pay more for it.

I do think that the early blades were much more likely to have the pattern on the veneer.

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Chasse Patate

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Butterfly doesn't say anything about this - as you say, it probably started out on some forum. Might even have started in China on a Chinese forum.

Iskandar