OOAK Table Tennis Forum

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OOAK Table Tennis Shop | Re-Impact Blades | Butterfly Table Tennis bats
Setup1: Re-Impact Smart, Viper OX, Victas VS 401 Setup2: Re-Impact Barath, Dtecs OX, TSP Triple Spin Chop 1.0mm Setup3: Re-Impact Dark Knight, Hellfire OX, 999 Turbo
Recent Articles: Butterfly Tenergy Alternatives | Tenergy Rubbers Compared | Re-Impact User Guide

Surprising to see even their own catalogue lists the t10+ blade as regular t10. A while ago they changed the 5 ply t10 to 7 ply t10+ without notice. Also changed t9 to t9+. Both + versions aren't bad but different from the regular ones.

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Competition bats:
Win-tec power def Tibhar 5Q sound Power Update 1.8 * Spinlord Agenda ox
TSP Balsa 3.5 Tibhar Genius+Optimium sound 1.8 * Grass D-tecs ox

Put to rest:
Galaxy T10 Bluefire M2 2.0 Palio Ck531a ox
Victas Koji Matsushita Tibhar Genius+Optimium sound MAX * Spinlord Dornenglanz ox
Donic Defplay Senso Tibhar Aurus Sound Black max * Grass D-tecs ox

Check out my quest for my new blade here: http://ooakforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=23241
Current standings:
Butterfly Matshushita powerdefence * Joola Chen Weixing * Nittaku KVU * Nittaku Shake defense* Tibhar stratus power defense * Victas Koji Matsushita * Yasaka Sweeper * Win-Tec power defence

Yes I find that annoying too... they keep changing stuff without letting anyone know... that does not benefit them or the customers

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OOAK Table Tennis Shop | Re-Impact Blades | Butterfly Table Tennis bats
Setup1: Re-Impact Smart, Viper OX, Victas VS 401 Setup2: Re-Impact Barath, Dtecs OX, TSP Triple Spin Chop 1.0mm Setup3: Re-Impact Dark Knight, Hellfire OX, 999 Turbo
Recent Articles: Butterfly Tenergy Alternatives | Tenergy Rubbers Compared | Re-Impact User Guide

2014 catalog!

http://www.yinhe1986.cn/discuz/viewthre ... a=page%3D1

What's this I see on Page 10:



Weird...

And I get the chuckles when I see this picture (it was in last year's catalog, too..).



Iskandar

And strange - this one's not even mentioned.



Iskandar

Antique (well, 1980s) "Yinhe" blades (called "Baiyangdian" back then, I think).

http://www.yinhe1986.cn/discuz/viewthre ... a=page%3D1




As I suspected.. the 896 and 898 were "legacy" designs.





Iskandar

What a snazzy handle design; I'm a big fan of the classic lacquered handle as well. I absolutely loved Yinhe's Uranus rubber when I started playing ping pong again, but it was abruptly removed from the ITTF list and they stopped producing it. They have a 'Uranus Poly' now, but I hear it's not similar. Still have several of the old Uranus sheets lying around.

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Custom Blade 'Hard Justice' w/ Yasaka Cobalt a
Tatco Hornet w/ ATP Leland Era

Every try running the Yinhe "forum" through a machine translator?

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... tjfdg8NBvQ

This is the thread with the 896/898 blade photos above.

Things on the thread:

1) Yinhe started up in 1986, by 1987 the first bats were being sold, these were the 891 and 892 under the brand name "Baiyangdian" (the name of the place where the factory is located). These had a paulownia-meranti-paulownia core. The meranti came from South East Asia and is a hardwood. I don't think they produce these any more.

2) The 896 and 898 came next (there's also something about a blade with nylon mesh in it). The 896 uses a paulownia core, then two thin plies of meranti and the face plies aren't mentioned (probably paulownia). The 898 looks like a 6 ply blade, all six plies being meranti. The 896 and 898 are still being produced, the new ones look a lot more modern.

3) That weird ZL1992 blade dates back to the eponymous year (doesn't this sentence sound like it's machine translated? )

4) In 1993, they learned how to dye the wood, in 1995 they were producing dyed wood veneer handles and okoume blades. The 966 blade (7 ply bass, still being sold) came in 1996. The 970 blade came in 1997 (I see a pattern here..), carbon blade, still in current catalog. 1999, 992, 3-carbon, ditto.

And then it gets less interesting, with more modern bats showing up after 2000. Blades introduced in the year 2000 are (you guessed it..) the 2000 series.

So yes, the 8xx and 9xx blades are legacy designs from the 1980s and 1990s.

More interesting stuff in other threads. Machine translator doesn't work on the catalog, unfortunately, since the pages are all images.

Iskandar

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... puITVr-sEA

In this one, they talk about the difficulties they had locating a source of Ayous (Obeche) in the country. The machine translation gets a little difficult to follow, but as far as I can make out they initially thought that Ayous was some sort of wood from Thailand. Apparently Butterfly was using it in a lot of blades and they wanted in, so it took some searching to find it.

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... 7dCDHXVV5w

Wasn't there some complaint that Yinhe didn't announce changes to the T-10 and T-11? Here it is. The announcement, I mean.

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... j5wglxdDhQ

This was some sort of logo design contest, I think.

Iskandar

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... 4l3QdJO3qA

This is a look into the Yinhe blade factory. Some of this stuff was supposedly "secret", there's some stuff they allude to that they didn't include.

The wood apparently arrives at the factory in the form of untrimmed logs (!). A lot of it comes from Africa (ayous, limba, etc.). There's a picture of some nicely quarter-sawn logs and billets. Some is kiln dried, some air-dried (takes a year..). Wood to be sliced into veneer is boiled or cooked. Then it is run over a knife (huge machine) to slice off veneer (flitch cut). The flitches are then dried in a kiln. The narrow sheets of veneer are stiched together to make wider sheets. The old way of doing this was to use paper tape to hold the sheets together (I saw this at a veneer factory in the US once), but Yinhe has a machine that lays down a zigzag line of hot melt glue across the seam. Apparently saves time and is neater. The zigzag bead of glue gets melted when the blade layers are heated together in the press. They use a roller to apply hot melt glue to the layers, and then the layers are assembled in a heated press, this fuses all the layers together and ensures that the blade is absolutely flat. A CNC router is used to cut out the shape of the blade (looks like a 1 ply Japanese penhold, but the wood looks like pine and the grain direction is all wrong!), and a router used to carve handle pieces. Then they use a finishing sander to produce that mirror-quality surface Yinhe blades are famous for.

Iskandar

This is by far best of the links, esp the the epic story of their search for Ayous, incl how they got ripped off on their first purchase and made the erroneously purchased Thai oak into the first china carbon blade anyway, plus subsequent tales of petty bribery. The sort of behind the scene struggle for a small business rarely told.

This thread has photos & description of the production process:

http://www.yinhe1986.cn/discuz/viewthre ... a=page%3D1

Rubber production:

http://www.yinhe1986.cn/discuz/viewthre ... ra=&page=1

There are probably the most detail TT production intros I've seen.

https://translate.googleusercontent.com ... lwQM-lH7hA

Here's the english-translated rubber manufacturing thread. It dispels a lot of ideas I've had about how rubber is made. Many of you have probably seen the Rasant research video:



In this, they show some of the steps for making sponge. It's exactly the same as the way Yinhe does it. In the past I imagined they would pour liquid latex (that had been foamed up with air or some gas) into a mold, where it would set. Actually, it never ever is in the liquid state.

The Yinhe page starts with photos of the basic ingredients - natural and synthetic rubber. These go both into the sponge and the topsheet. The natural rubber is a honey-amber color (and thus of high quality - lower quality rubber is dark), while the synthetic rubber is white. The rubber - in the solid state - is cut into pieces and fed into a masticator, where it is mixed with additives - dye/pigment, probably plasticizers, sulfur (for vulcanization) and in the case of sponge, baking powder (probaby calcium, sodium or ammonium bicarbonate) to produce gas which makes the pores during vulcanization. The masticator is a pair of rollers, the mix goes through this until it is homogeneous.

For topsheets, they roll the rubber into sheets (looks like they're about 3-4mm thick), which are placed between the faces of a mold. One side of the mold has cavities for the pips, the other the top surface (for inverted) plus the lettering. Each mold set is large enough for two sheets. The loaded molds are stacked in layers into a heated hydraulic press - there seem to be wire mesh hoses coming in from the sides that might provide steam, maybe not. The heating causes the rubber to vulcanize (it makes cross-links in the molecular structure) and along with the pressure allows the rubber to fill all the cavities in the mold. There's a photo of the sheet as it comes out of the mold, some very thin rubber has been squeezed out the sides of the mold.

For the sponge, they put cakes of the sponge mix into thick molds (they say 12mm) and it goes into the same press. The sponge expands while it vulcanizes. When it comes out it is a great deal bigger than it was before. After this, the sponge cake has to sit for a while on the shelf to age, during which time it shrinks. There is a distinct "crust", which is discarded - or used for "supermarket rackets" (now you know where those come from). In the past, Butterfly used this crust as "Kawatsuki Sponge", but I think the practice has been outlawed. The sponge is then sliced to thickness.

The thread ends with a photo of a room FULL of sliced sheets of sponge. They don't show how the topsheets are bonded to the sponge, there is some allusion to some of this stuff being "secret", and they were wondering if they'd posted too much!

Yinhe sells rec bats - I'm tempted to buy one off ebay to see if they use the "crust sponge" - which I don't think they do, not for these rackets, because they use Yinhe 9000 rubber (those "funny shaped" cakes of sponge will end up in 9000 sheets, which you can buy for $5 a sheet). The "supermarket bats" are probably sold under a different name.

Don't know what Northern and Southern pancakes are like.

Iskandar

That passage just likens sponge to "steamed buns" (leavened w/ yeast) vs. topsheet as unleavened (northern) pancakes. Southern pancakes might use some yeast so narrator tells southerners to hush.

Speaking of cakes, they're an even better analogy since cakes like sponge also use baking soda to expand.

Yeah, the machine translation gets a little garbed at times. The previous passage says making sponge is NOT like steamed buns (I expect the translation software inadvertently changed the polarity of the sentence).

Still, it makes me wonder what a "northern egg roll bar" might like if one existed.. Makes me think of those survival energy bars, only made of egg spring roll ingredients rather than granola..

Iskandar