OOAK Table Tennis Forum

What is the measurement of Max sponge these days? When I was playing as a kid in the 70's, Max sponge was known to be 2.5mm but I don't know if that included the rubber top-sheet on the sponge in the measurement. 2.2mm being Max sponge now. Help!

SANWEI claimed some of their rubbers incorporeted max thick sponge of 2.6 mm.

As far as I can tell there is no explicit limit on sponge. Sponge is allowed on "sandwich rubber" (the other component of the sandwich being "pimpled rubber") and max total thickness of 4.0 mm for pimpled rubber + sponge, which implicitly limits sponge to less than 4 mm. How much less depends on how thin you can (and would want to) make the pimpled rubber.

See ITTF's Technical leaflet T4

The rules state that the maximum thickness of the sandwich is 4mm. They also state that the maximum thickness of the topsheet is 2mm. There is also a rule that states that, for inverted rubber, the MINIMUM height of the pips is 0.5mm (for pips out, it's 1.0mm). So theoretically, max sponge for inverted sandwich is just under 3.5mm, if you make the pips height 0.5mm and make the rest of the topsheet microscopically thick. There is a limit to what is practical, of course, from observation it seems to be around 2.5mm or so, though for most sheets it's thinner - 2.2 to 2.3mm. There's a trend - I forget exactly what it was now - towards some sort of new topsheet geometry - I think it was ultra short pips - that you see on rubbers like Rasanter and Karis, these might theoretically have thicker max sponge.

What people actually use has changed from two decades ago. Back when the ball was 38mm, few people used sponge thicker than 2.0mm, beginners were instructed to use 1.5mm. These days beginners start out with max sponge - many Chinese rubbers are ONLY available with max sponge (usually 2.2 or 2.3mm though).

Guys.. the headstamps are back!

https://equipments.ittf.com/#/equipment ... _coverings

Iskandar