You're probably right, but I'm not suggesting everyone has to do this or that customers need to expect this. It's more just a thing that would be interesting from an educational standpoint, especially to perform on commercially available blades. Someone else should probably be doing the measurements rather than the manufacturers.
I do appreciate that ultimately you can't understand a system just from one or two parameters, so maybe it's just completely misguided and an empirical measurement of the ball's rebound speed would be a simpler method, but seeing as the rubber and sponge is the dominant factor in real-world performance, maybe that's a waste of time too.
I've also noticed there's a lot of real-world variation between examples of the same blade model, so I suppose there's always a risk of effectively spreading bad data.
Either way my background is simulations, so it's expected I would want to quantify them in a way or another. I'm particularly interested in what the composition choices do to the nonlinearity of the spring.
I share your curiosity 😊😊 If there were an effective way to accurately model the performance of a new blade design (prior to prototyping) it would be
such a boon to my blade development projects!
Unfortunately if there *is* such tech available cheaply at SME level, it's manufacturers are keeping it very quiet 😂😂
Currently, the best thing you can do is keep comparative charts of the main mechanical properties of each of your main wood species, then do rough 'seat of your pants' instinctive comparisons in your head (based purely on personal experience) of just how much accumulative difference any particular changes you make to a blade's composition might make.
Another thing that makes it super tricky to model any changes, is that the timber industry's published lists of timber mechanical properties are all created from the wrong test material. They calculate those figures by experimenting on standardised timber beams, *not* from testing veneers.
This is a real pain in the rear for blade makers, as the mechanical properties of veneers are (more often than not) radically different to the properties that timber has in board or beam form.
Veneers are quite frankly a lot like the "quantum physics" realm of timber: the smaller your ply diameters gets, the greater the influence of micro-structures within the wood on the timber's mechanical properties. It's largely irrelevant what a timber's properties are according to averaged industry figures for my purposes, but that said, it's still the best reference info I can access.
What I really need to know is how a timber species behaves in veneer thicknesses of under 2.0mm, under 1.5mm, under 1.0mm, and under 0.5mm... because between these 'extremes', a veneer's mechanical behaviour can (and typically DOES) change considerably. Very few organisations however study such things, and the few who DO actually study it usually don't like to publish their findings. 🙄
But even if they *did* publish their findings, the results would be unreliable the second you changed the orientation or location of the veneer within the tree's 3-dimensional cross section: quarter-sawn veneers typically do not have the exact same properties as crown cut veneers, and veneers taken from near the bole or base of a tree can be (and typically are) hugely different from those taken near the canopy.
Long story short, trying to create an accurate predictive model of timber behaviour with all of the above is real advanced-chaos-theory type stuff 🤣🤣🤣🤣
