OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Gah. My own words have come back to bite me in the arse.

I had a ttnpp order arrive this morning, and in there was a sheet of 729 Aurora 42deg. First up, they've sent a black sheet when I ordered red, so fair enough. But when I opened it up the topsheet was totally separated from the sponge, and interestingly the sponge was a fair bit smaller than the topsheet...

So far I've had QC problems with a few sheets.

1) Palio - in general, I think this company has some real QC problems, at least with some of their line. CJ8000 and Yasaka ZAP have the problem of "dish" - the sponge seems to have shrunk after they attached it to the topsheet, so the sheet bows towards the sponge (the opposite of the "dome" you used to get when using speed glue). A lot of rubber sheets have a slight amount of dish, but I've never seen cases as bad as in CJ8000 and ZAP. In one or two cases this was so bad attaching the rubber to the blade was impossible, I ended up with an actual crease in the topsheet. Only fix was the heavily Seamoon the sheet. I also had one sheet of Emperor Dragon (the retailed package stuff, not the $4 "training" sheets you find at ttnpp, all of which have been excellent so far) with a blister-like area of topsheet detached from the sponge. Very annoying.

2) Kokutaku 868 (the two-in-one pack that's either pink or gold) - I had one bum sheet where the sponge and topsheet were misaligned AND applied wrongly so that part of the sheet was bulged upwards. But this was from a fly-by-night store on AliExpress, not from Eacheng or any of the two or three other vendors I've had good luck with. Maybe these sheets were salvaged out of the reject pile (three turned out OK, one was bad).

3) Reactor Corbor - not exactly a flaw, but the eight or so sheets I weighed had a bimodal distribution of weights - half were moderate in weight (around 60g), the other half were almost 70g! No, it didn't correlate with color. It does tell me their manufacturing procedures are inconsistent - most likely when it comes to mixing sponge. Then again, these were $3 a sheet...

729/KTL sheets have so far been nicely flat, with no QC problems. Haven't come across any bad Yinhe sheets, either.

Iskandar

Me too - this is my first bad 729 sheet. And it's laughably bad on an epic scale.

Take photographs! And post them!

Oh.. forgot to mention. Haifu "training" products, in the clear plastic vacuum packs are apparently ALL blems (they must have a very high reject rate at the factory, they sell a LOT of these sheets, which are supposedly very popular in China, clubs buy them by the stack, apparently). The ones I've opened all had some flaw - mainly alignment problems between sponge and topsheet that are mostly visible around the edges, but the sheets are all very usable.

Iskandar

I know we're in danger of going OT here, but here are the pics of the Aurora





As you can see, the topsheet is almost completely detached (just a very weak bond on one border area) and the sponge is too small.

One wonders what glue is used to attach the topsheet to the sponge - it's usually very strong (and in the case of Butterfly rubber, it's so strong you have to destroy the sponge to remove the topsheet). Whatever it is, it's not the usual contact cements available to us, especially not the cements we use to attach rubber to blade. Which is why I haven't tried assembling my own sandwich yet. It would probably be easier with pips-out, of course.

Iskandar

Aaaaaanyway.

Had a training session last night which briefly involved the AK47 Blue on a WSC-JO blade. It actually felt pretty good for the money - very steady, controlled, predictable. It wasn't very lively or spinny until you really put some beans into your shot, but the lack of overall speed meant that you could get away with big, expansive strokes. Very much like a slower, less elastic version of something like Airoc.

It was far too slow for me on the WSC, so I wanted to move it to a Donic Crest AR+ which is a bit faster. However, disaster struck. Peeling the rubber off the blade resulted in it committing suicide with bits of sponge and topsheet flying all around the room. It totally fell apart.

So that's the end of that!

_________________
Blade: Libero TTL (Hand made)
Forehand:SPINLORD Marder 1.2 (Black)
Backhand: Sword Scylla (Ox+ 0. (Red)

Wow.. That I'd love to see photos of.. Had sheets delaminate but I've never had one fall apart like that. By the way... I had a sheet of KTL Golden Star delaminate shortly after I put it on the blade. Thankfully something that's happened very rarely to me so far.

Iskandar

Just ordered a sheet of this rubber due to some great reviews on European forums, also ttdd.de (company behind Spinlord if I am not mistaken) listed new AK47 as a top recommendation with a highly favorable description.

The report about the rubber falling apart is a bit worrying but I don't plan to take the rubber down and reglue it (unless it sucks : ) so hopefully i will be fine.

Should be a week till my rubber arrives and will report back after some testing !

Well, if you do take it off - get the video camera out first...

Iskandar

My sheet of blue AK47 finally arrived and I am pretty excited about it and it looks quite promising.

My sheet is 5 grams lighter that the AndySmith's one, its has a very soft modern looking sponge and seems super grippy.

Should have the sheet glued in next couple of days and tested with my coach and some more experienced players and will report back with some impressions.

Barfly Have you tested the AK47 rubber yet?

I wonder how it compares to BLIT'Z

Hi Dan, I never tried Blitz so can't compare directly but my impressions of AK47 are pretty positive but take them with a grain of salt since I am not very high rated player

The rubber has a soft, tensor feel sponge but firmer topsheet compared to Rakza soft and Ckylin I used previous so overall a bit harder feel.

Its very grippy so no slippage, has solid spin (but not on Rakza level) and is pretty fast, faster than Rakza soft and actually a bit too fast for my less than stellar backhand so I will probably replace it with something slower and more controllable.

Blocks are easy so I guess its not too sensitive to incoming spin which is a plus.

My coach tried it a bit and had positive first impression and one of the most experienced players I play with liked it so much that he wants to trade his Giant Dragon Storm National (another very solid Chinese rubber) for it, so overall I don't think you can go horribly wrong with it and it should represent great value for money.

I will probably take it off today and replace it with mentioned Storm National so I will report back if it survived the replacement or it blew up in pieces as in Andy's case

Nice, I've ordered the RED one so will be even faster. That's what I like on my backhand.