OOAK Table Tennis Forum

What characteristics of a blade and rubber (both together and seperately) determines the amount of spin it can produce?

Re blades a bit of flexibility and softer outer Plies such as Limbs gives more dwell= more spin.

For rubbers as well as factors like tackiness or grip of the top sheet, it can depend on the player. A high level player with fast action will in theory get more spin from a hard rubber but a lower level player like me will get more spin from a softer rubber as it is easier to engage the sponge.

Much as everyone loves to theorize about this, I doubt anyone outside Butterfly actually knows for sure.. There are fast blades and slow blades (that can be measured fairly easily), the rest of it would require high speed cameras, expensive instruments, etc. Some blades FEEL "flexible" but try actually bending them. You won't get anywhere (and the forces on a blade when it hits the ball - even very hard - aren't all that much, really). The rubber deforms a heck of a lot more.

Iskandar

The most important contributor is ... <drum roll> ... the player.

Most reasonable players can get a more or less similar amount of spin out of a $550 blade with > $100 rubbers on each side as with a < $20 blade with $20 - $30 rubbers on each side.

Of course, it may be easier or harder with one or the other to do so.

iskandar can probably tell you the cheaper blade and rubber combination. (Sanwai M8 with Batwings or something?)

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I can easily tell if one combo is faster than another, but I can't really tell whether it produces more spin than the other combo. Not unless it's really old rubber or pips out or something of the sort. Agreed - the player's technique and ability will determine the amount of spin.

Iskandar

Yeah I don’t understand the physics of it. How can a ball make a blade flex? Yet I can certainly feel the stiffness of a blade during play and like some flex for spinny looping and stiffer for blocking. Still experimenting to determine the right balance to suit my game.

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2. S&T Black & White / Armstrong SH-I 1.8 / TSP Curl P3 Alpha R OX

Carbon blades do feel "stiff", and you do feel something interesting when you hit a loop correctly that one might interpret as "flex", but I'm pretty sure it's all in the vibrations rather than actual blade flexing. If anything is flexing it's actually the rubber rather than the blade. With a proper loop the impact is at a pretty high angle to the blade, so the resultant force normal to the blade surface would be pretty low, but the rubber will deform, and it won't just deform normal to the blade, it also gets "dragged sideways" as it grips the ball.

Iskandar

Speaking on rubbers, I feel that spin is determined by how much the rubber resists deformation, how much the rubber can deform, and how fast the rubber returns to its original state after being deformed.
There are other things like topsheet thickness, pimple geometry and orientation, tackiness, tension etc. but the complete relation between sponge and topsheet is beyond me.
Its hard to speak in definites about the way equipment works because much of it is down to chemistry and geometry. It'd definitely be interesting to try discovering what exactly makes equipment work the way it does, but I can't imagine that it would be cheap

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SPW/Solo

And how much "slippage" there is between ball and rubber. Really shouldn't be much with modern rubbers, if any - and the actual spin produced can be more than would be predicted by racket speed alone since the rubber bounces back.



At 3:02.

Iskandar

So what is the general rule to choose a good blade for looping ?

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