OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Did more testing last night,swapping my two rubbers the Joola Express One and the Adidas P7 over to a Donic Waldner carbon and a very expensive off plus 200 dollar Chinese blade,forget its name.

Anyway,compared to my favourite Xiom Hayabusa ZXI blade these other two blades were far,far slower.

The Donic Waldner carbon on a flat hit smash was similar in speed but on all the other shots particularly my blocking and counter attacking was so much slower. Played 3 games with this combo so i did get a good feel for the speed.

Next I tried the expensive off plus Chinese blade and it lasted less than 2 minutes ----laughably slow and alo too loopy a ball flight.

Have now tried around 10-15 off plus blades with these two rubbers and I can say that the Xiom Hayabusa for pure speed wins by a mile.

The Gergely was the next fastest but really light years behind for speed.

The only downside with this Xiom blade is the dwell time/grip on the backhand is quite low. I get around this by using the Adidas P7 which has exceptional grip.

Once i get used to a set up with a certain speed,i find it very difficult to return to the slower set up

I'm not expert on blades but the Hyabasu ZXI is probably the fastest I have tried. I used to coach a 2150ish player who used one and he simply couldn't push with it. His pushes would frequently miss the table by more than a meter. Unless you have solid technique, excellent touch, and fast arm speed I dont think you should go anywhere near such a blade.

I'm not sure why this blade is so fast as mine weighs only 82g.

The extra speed over other off plus blades is certainly not caused by extra mass as this is close to the lightest blade ive tested. The Mazunov at 100g was the heaviest.

Could be to do with the extra spring the materials produce. The ball sort of catapults off the blade more.

Just like in tennis when you use looser string the ball catapults much more.

As far as needing a fast arm to use this blade---would say on the forehand I have quite a slow motion action.

With touch on pushes etc,you do get accustomed to the speed it just takes time!

The two shots i most enjoy with this blade are the block/roll,where I hardly hit the thing but it turns into a near or full counter attack,and the easy high ball where I do like to swing hard.

This set up reminds me a lot of 10 years back where many used speed glue,now those bats were unusable for me,too fast and too soft feeling.

The fastest blades I've ever used were my home-made balsa/birch ply blades. Put two layers of 1/32" 3 ply birch over a 1/4" balsa core and it about launches a ball into space. I'm about ready to start making blades again but I don't think I'll try anything this fast again - you can slow these blades down by going with a thinner core and/or thinner face plies.

Iskandar