OOAK Table Tennis Forum

When I started playing (dinosaur jokes are applicable here), Butterfly Allround rubber was very popular. It came inverted as D13 and pips out with C3 big pips and A102 small pips. For those familiar at all with the Butterfly A102 short pips, do you know of anything similar on the market now? The pips on A102 were small and close together. It was marketed as the "control" pips out, which it was, and I played with it quite a bit. I would like to find something similar but so far have not run across anything.

I well remember the D13 though on my pre-made Butterfly which I proudly owned and played with in my early TT T-Rex days

There was a time (probably just post 1959, when they actually passed rules to limit the kinds of bat surface you were allowed to use) when Butterfly sold TWO rubbers - D13 (which was inverted), and C4 (pips-out). (Plus a hard rubber, of course - Orthodox.) If you ever find Denis Neale's book (I think it was this:

https://www.amazon.com/Table-Tennis-Way ... 363&sr=8-1

except that our high school library had the paperback version) you'll find a photo of his bat, with Butterfly C4 on it.

In subsequent years, "D13" became the Butterfly code-word for inverted rubber and "C4" for pips out. ALL inverted sheets were "D13" sheets - Sriver, Tempest, Plous, Super Sriver, etc. They were all marked with "D13" on the headstamp. Maybe still are on Sriver, for all I know. They dropped this practice at some point in time, when I wasn't playing.

Makes you wonder if there ever was a D12, and what it was. Or a C3. And I wonder what Butterfly sold between 1952 and 1959 - did they sell bare sponge? Satoh's bat (at the 1952 World Champs, with the bare sponge), was made by Armstrong, by the way.. Wikipedia says Butterfly (Tamasu) got started in 1950, so they must have been selling sponge. And hard rubber of course.

Iskandar

https://www.butterfly.co.jp/story/histo ... /vol5.html
Tamasu Butterfly ORTHODOX series (no sponge) from 1957.

A.102 ORTHODOX pimples-out:
Diameter - 1.0 mm
Height - 1.2 mm



/Be happy/

Cool. A102 and a lot of other versions I didn't know about. Thanks!

See if this works.

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... Fvol6.html

Scroll to the bottom - they sold several types of "orthodox". The inverted (D13) sheets and there were three pips-out (C4) variants - A002, A003 and A004. These were available as "hard rubber" (no sponge) as well.

"Soft Back" rubber obviously means "inverted", "table rubber" means "pips out". "Single rubber" means a bare topsheet (with a cloth backing, in this case).

It's interesting how many sheets in this series of pictures (from the 1960s and 70s) are black. From what I remember in the mid-70s to the early 1980s MOST sheets on the market were red (with a few green ones here and there). Yasaka Black Power was one of the few black sheets in the late 70s/early 80s, there was even a blurb on the back of the packet claiming that black sheets didn't last very long but they (Yasaka) had discovered the secret to making black sheets that lasted.

Iskandar