OOAK Table Tennis Forum

This is not a problem if you live in Australia. (Oh, hang on - I forgot Australia doesn't exist! Silly me.)

Yeah, when it comes to buying things, there are a couple of items or materials that make me envy Australians (who apparently DO exist even if Australia doesn't.. ) but then I remember that for a lot of other things Australia happens to be at the far end of a very long supply chain...

Iskandar

Yes iskandar it is strange .... And yes i have my original post here https://www.tabletennisdaily.com/forum/showthread.php?11808-Create-your-own-blade/page6
and thanks ..... the all my blade making stuff all begins from this forum .... i`m always going here to watch what new comes out here and who has news with their designs or so ,but this one is strange...

Good grief. That is blatant. Stealing photos is one thing, this is a blatant copy-and-paste, text and all. Weird... wonder why he did it.

Iskandar

Hi, so i was just finished reading the whole 31 pages and just joined the forum to post this.

Any of you guys accepting a custom blade making, and discussion in the process (i know nothing of wood other than those been posted on the internet about blade composition)? I went to Ross' site and PMed him already, and waiting for his reply as of this moment, so i think, why not asking the other members here since i read that lots of you guys creates your own paddle, just like Bobpuls and others.

The finished blade would be shipped internationally, so we will need to discuss the cost also from the scratch.

So i was thinking a 7-ply blade
1-Koto, 0.7
2-Soft carbon (suggestion? i read Ross used Ipe to achieve this), 0.4
3-Ayous, 0.7
4-Kiri, 2
5-Ayous, 0.7
6-Hinoki, 0.4
7-Mahogany, 0.7

Yes i read that using different composition would increase the difficulty of the making since it might bent, and if it's really not possible then i will need to change the composition to be 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 (refer to the 7 ply mentioned above). And, counting the weight is not on my forte, a bit confused on that part. From my composition, it's already 5.6mm thick without glue, so with glue on, around 6.3mm?

By this composition, could you guys estimate the feeling it would be?

Discussion and/or suggestion would be awesome.

Cheers,
PR

If you use thin epoxy and use a couple of very stiff flat plates to sandwich the blade as it cures you shouldn't have any warpage problems. If you use any sort of water based glue, though.. the thin veneers will roll up into a taco when they get wet on one side.

Iskandar

Thanks for the info

The cut and paste of someone else's post from a different forum has occurred a few times now. It is probably a bot, seeking to establish credibility.

_________________
Other setups:
DHS H301 Blade/DHS Hurricane 3 Nat/Loki GTX Pro
DHS H301 Blade/Loki GTX Pro/Loki GTX Pro

I freely admit I'm totally confused by this suggested composition. Ignoring the asymmetry for a moment, what are you trying to achieve with layers 4 to 7? Why would you layer Kiri (an excellent mid-ply) with Ayous-Hinoki-Mahogany? Why stick Hinoki as a medial ply? Why Hinoki in .4mm? What do you expect it to achieve? Why layer it with another soft timber in Ayous, which is also generally used as an outer ply? Regardless of composition, a seven ply blade is going to be stiff and I'm struggling to see how two soft layers below the surface of a thicker, harder layer are going to have any significant influence. What is your thinking here?

I had tried different blades, and from what i tried, i really prefer a stiff outer ply rather than a soft outer ply.. So by putting the soft in the inner part, i was hoping i could get the vibration from the inner ply.. And layer 4-7 should be the backhand side by the way..

Since i'm not that expert in wood characteristic, though i have read on some forums, that's why i'm seeking for advice on this matter also from those who knows more.

Kinda curious about the "lpe" and how you're going to get 0.4mm hinoki.

Iskandar

TBH, I'm neither an expert player nor an expert blade builder. Even so, I think there are some issues here. For a start, you seem to be confusing different characteristics of a blade. Outer plies can't be stiff. Stiffness is a characteristic of the whole blade. Simply put: thicker/more plies = stiff; thinner/fewer plies = flexy. Regardless of the composition - the diffferent combinations of timber you use - seven ply is almost guaranteed to give you a stiff blade, although the overall thickness you're talking about is not crazy stiff. The other pairing is hardness and softness. Hard outer ply = hard/crisp feeling; soft outer ply = soft/cushioned feeling. The inner layers will contribute to the overall feeling of the blade, but ultimately it is the outer layer which will have most effect on how the blade feels. The combination of thick or thin with hard or soft then gives the overall characteristics of the blade, something along the lines of:

Thick blade with hard outer = Off+, Off
Thick blade with soft outer = Off, Off-
Thin blade with hard outer = Off-, All+, All
Thin blade with soft outer = All+, All, All-

Of course, there are lots of factors involved in how a blade finishes up, but you can't escape certain realities. One is that flexibility diminishes as layers are added; another is that there is always a trade-off between speed and softness. For example, single-ply hinoki blades have to be very thick (9-10mm or even more) in order to generate high speed.

I guess my real question is, "What are the characteristics you're looking for in the completed blade?" What speed range and what feeling? Then will your suggested composition offer you a realistic chance of achieving that?

I've been wondering about this. Back when I started reading this forum people were often talking about "flexy" blades. Someone even claimed that if you bent a "flexy" blade it would bend like a rainbow. Well, I tried it. It's impossible without breaking the blade, and if you get anywhere near to breaking the blade, that's far more force than can be applied to the bat by a hard-struck ball. The most ANY blade will "flex" is maybe a millimeter or two, this includes the really thin 5mm ones (most blades are 6+mm). (There are some really cheap rec blades that are 3mm thick, but..) Most of this "flex" turns out to be in the neck, where the handle meets the blade proper, and where the blade is the narrowest (a narrow beam is more flexible than a wide one, other dimensions being constant). I suppose if you really did want to make a blade that flexed lengthwise, 2mm thick carbon fiber sheet would be a possible material to use, but I suspect a blade that actually flexed in this way under the pressure a table tennis ball puts on it when being hit would be unusable.

So I think this thing that we perceive as "flex" is something else, something that doesn't really have to do with longitudinal bending.. Maybe it DOES have to do with the surface of the blade yielding (even if it's only by tiny fractions of a mm), or maybe it's just something to do with vibrations, which means it has something to do with the soft/hard property you discuss in the next paragraph.

Iskandar

As I have said here http://ooakforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=431&p=359894#p359898
I started last month seriously learning TT and built a few TT blades.
For the first one I used the materials I allready had at home and I designed it beeing afraid not to come up with something that will properly hit the ball.

The composition of the first was like this:
mahogany 1mm
fiberglass 120gsm
balsa 1mm at 90 degrees
balsa 2mm
balsa 1mm at 90 degrees
fiberglass 120 gsm
mahogany 1mm

Here it is:



The glue used was ThreadMaster Lite epoxy. Handles are made from spruce and mahogany. It ended up at around 6.4mm tickness and at around 90 grams.
Anyway it has some quality issues (for example the handles are not glued perfectly) but it is a playable blade. As far as I can tell is way better that the cheap bats you can find on shopping malls. Anyway this was my original wish.
As a comparison, today I had played with an all-wood blade that is rated as ALL, and the one made by me is a bit faster. Also the impact feedback is better. You feel a bang everytime you hit the ball.

The second blade was made for a colleague that lost his Yasaka blade. He input was the his a very ofensive player and likes to hit the ball so it goes laser like.
So, I read on the internet and got inpired by the Butterfly Hadraw SR. But since I do not had wenge veneer available, I used walnut. So the composition ended up:

walnut 1mm
pine 1mm - at 90 degrees
ayous 3mm
pine 1mm - at 90 degrees
walnut 1mm

I used the same epoxy. Handles made from Ceiba and Balsa. It ended up at 7.1mm and 108 grams. Heavy as hell.
He paired it with some Friendship 729-2 rubbers https://revspin.net/rubber/729-729-2-sensor.html
And it went up, is almost unmanageably fast for him.
As I have tested it, if you hit the ball only a bit harder, it goes over the table in a straight line. Than, if you really hit the ball, it goes for some good meters in a straight line. As he came back to me with feedback, he will (try to) adapt to the blade since it allows him to make some hits that the oponent hardly intercepts.

This is how it looks with rubbers attached:




P.S. Will later edit to add pictures.
Edit: Added pictures with the first blade.

Yeah, balsa blades do have that "feeling of power" to them. I used to make blades with 3/16" or 1/4" balsa cores and 1/32" birch plywood (all of this available at model plane stores). The 1/4" - 1/32" blades were just bloody fast. The first one I built actually had 1/64" birch ply faces, this was a lot more reasonable. A 3/16" core would slow it down even more. I also experimented with carbon and glass veil, and very thin glass cloth. I used cellulose glue (a.k.a. model airplane cement, balsa glue) - e.g. SIGMent, Duco, Ambroid - to glue the handle pieces on. The advantage was that you could easily remove the handle by using acetone to soften the glue.

There was someone called Bob Brickell who made blades with the same materials, and he sold them at tournaments around the Michigan-Ohio-Indiana region. He even had a 10-ply birch bat (made up of two layers of 5 ply 1/8" birch. All hobby shop materials. Some of the blades still had "SIG" stamped on the face wood (this is a company that sells balsawood and birch plywood in the US).


Iskandar