I had a discussion along these lines with another poster recently, who wanted to weight their blade more towards their handle to improve its balance.
You might find that information useful, but rather than re-direct you to the previous thread, I 've just cut and pasted my responses below in italics:
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- Balancing a blade more towards the handle is also an extremely simple thing to do - you can do it yourself through a number of methods:
- Removing the handle's scales and use heavier wood is one way, though this can also potentially affect your blade's playing characteristics if you're not careful.
- Cutting a small section out of your handle scales, inserting heavier material then gluing another section of wood on top is another.
- I've heard of a few people adding several grams of heavy material underneath their handle strapping too.
You can also achieve the same effect temporarily by playing with fingerless gloves and taping some weight to the palm, or even just holding a few grams of something small and heavy in your hand while you play.********************
You didn't mention if you wanted to weight your blade in a particular manner ie: towards the head, towards the handle, to merely shift the balance point in general, or even to keep a neutral balance while making the whole blade heavier.
You also didn't say if you play competition or not. IF you play comp at a high level, adding weight to your bat gets a bit tricky if it's not done in a permanent manner.
For a bladesmith, weighting an existing blade more towards the head is trickier than weighting it towards the handle, as you have far less blade real estate to deal with. With a blade that's still being built, the easiest way to make it top heavy is to either use lighter handle timber, or substitute one or more of its plies with denser ones (though this will also increase the speed of the bat), or do both at once.
If you only want an
existing blade to be slightly heavier / top heavy (
and you intend to use it in competition), put some heavier than normal epoxy resin around the playing surface edge. Put one thin coat round the whole playing surface edge, then one or two additional coats on the top third or top half 'to protect the leading edge' (...and add a few more grams
)
Avoid the temptation to add any tint/dye/colouring to the epoxy, as technically speaking the epoxy needs to be transparent so a match official can inspect the blade's ply sandwich. So long as you don't go overboard with the thickness of it, it *should* still be considered legal without any issues, and *should* sail through racquet control (though obviously I can't guarantee this, as really its up to the match officials).
Another head-weighting technique which is *potentially* competition legal is to add weight
to your edge tape.
If your blade has the thick, padded-foam style edging tape on it, you could buy some several split-bean lead sinkers, cut them completely in half (they come pre split) and embed them in the underside of the tape - put a small nick in the underside of the tape at the very top of your blade right on top of its vertical axis of symmetry (the centreline) and insert it into the foam so it doesn't touch your blade, then seal it with some double-sided tape. You put your first sinker right on the vertical centerline, then the rest go on either side of it at regular intervals, with an equal number of sinkers on both sides to maintain balance. Just remember to stop before you get to the outer edges of your blade's playing surface... you don't want too much extra weight out there - best to keep it close to the centrelines.
Edge tape modification for competition is a bit of a grey area really.
IIRC, you're not allowed to add anything to a blade that effectively extends its playing surface beyond its natural limits. Edge tape exists to protect the blade, not make it larger
That said, I note that while a single layer of edge tape
is considered part of the blade, it is
not considered part of the playing surface, and unlike a blade, there are seemingly
no rules which govern the constitution, material or physical make-up of edge tape... so I'm honestly not sure if adding weight TO the edge tape is an issue or not, or if altering the nature of the edge tape after manufacture is considered against the spirit of the game.
Adding lead-tape
underneath your edge tape would be very effective at increasing the weight, but potentially even more questionable for ITTF competition, as its harder to argue it's there to protect the blade, and harder to argue you're not trying to hide some temporary blade modifications.
Ironically, if however you only used lead tape
on its own AS an edge tape, and declare as such to racquet control, then that MIGHT be more likely to be ruled as legal (it would do a great job of protecting the edge, and you could argue that you have used lead tape as you have a habit of hitting the table very hard, while lead is soft enough to give and not damage the table, whilst being harder than the blade's inner material which needs protecting
(Ahhh - welcome to the weird, confusing world of bat modification and trying to interpret and accommodate both a player's wishes
and inflexible ITTF rules
)
If you go down the epoxy route (which for comp would be safest of all), be sure to weigh the stuff first so you know exactly how much weight you're adding, and remember to coat both left and right forward edges of your blade equally, otherwise you may throw out its balance during play.
As other posters have commented, lead tape on the handle works too and may also be competition legal - just be sure to cover it with something, as you don't want to touch the stuff too much - IIRC, heavy metals (like lead oxide) can be absorbed through the skin over time.
Other legal ways to make your blade heavier include:
- Using heavier rubbers (probably the easiest and best way of all frankly) Regardless of what rubbers you use, there's probably a heavier variant out there by another brand which plays a lot like your current ones... it may even make you play better. Yasaka Rakza's can be pretty damn heavy but they play brilliantly
- Add an engraved brass nameplate to the handle base
- Adding extra weight in holes drilled into the handle scales underneath your brass nameplate (again, quite legal.... just don't insert them into the blade's core).
- Glue wooden veneer around the blade's playing edge (again, a bit dodgy for competition blades, as while I doubt most match officials would kick up a fuss, it still does technically obscure their view of the playing surface's plywood sandwich, and they need to be able to inspect it under ITTF rules as part of raquet control).
... or as others have already said, just change to a heavier blade. There are literally hundreds of heavy ones out there to choose from
Hope this helps.