Great blade for precision play. Loops, smashes and drives are good and blocking is great. I play it with JOOLA Maxxx 500 on both sides. Very good. I can only recommend it to advanced players.
Joola MAXXX 500 was too hard for this blade and I switched to Bluefire JP1 and M3, then changed the M3 to Tibhar MX-P. Then changed to JP01 and MX-P.
This is a modern type loopng blade, quite stiff and the koto outer wood ply is a bit hard for me, but I can get used to it. This blade needs fast and short moves to generate agressive and fast loops, and the loops become quite effective. Old style big arm swing loops are possible too but this blade does not like that, there isn't that much dwell time for that type of stroke. If you love the tempo and the characteristics but want a little softer touch try Tibhar RedCypress.
My problem with this blade was, that I bought in with flared handle. The neck of the handle was very narrow so the blade vibrated much, annoyingly. I also tried the blade with straight handle with T05 on both sides and the vibration was gone mostly, only a nice faint of woody vibration was present. As far as I know and I experienced, the Tenergy rubbers absorb many vibrations, and numben the blade. Actually I don't teally like this, but in this particular case it was a good and a sad thing, this blade only feels good with Tenergy or a similar resonation swelling rubber.
My second problem was weight distribution. T05 in max thickness has an average weight of 0,24g/sq mm. Both Bluefire JP01 and Tibhar MX-P has the same average weight. So besides the resonation there should not be any disturbing in the weight distribution of the blade. The blade was 85,7g and the cut rubbers were around 47g each. When glued togerther the blade had the weight center near my index finger, so nearly at the top of the handle. The blade was a bit more than 190g assembled. Heavy blades are good when they are a bit head heavy, to help the player utilise the weight of the blade in a swing. Well this blade was nearly centered so it would not rotate with my wrist, making backhand swings requre an effort and time consuming. Latter nearly resulted in an injury, when you want to snap and twist your wrist to get a fast counterloop and the blade won't turn with your hand, and you twist your hand in unusual and painful way.
So buy it with Tenergy and straight handle. A very nice OFF blade, with woody feel.
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