i'm not sure what is Stiga's strategy, but they stood away from composite for many years and lost a lot of market share when composite too favorite with the big ball.
end of the day, Stiga haven't recovered that portion imo
I agree -- Stiga were huge in the 1980s and 90's --now they're just a shadow of their former selves.
Not sure why they lost their way, but I believe a failure to continue innovating is part of it. 🤔 There's so much space to innovate with blades that still hasn't been touched -- even just within the all wood blades space (which was always their traditional strength), there's so many area that haven't been addressed yet.
A big drop in production standards is also partially to blame here.'I'm currently doing a rebuild of sorts on an Ebenholtz for a mate of mine. The main panel veneers are in good nick, but the handle section is frankly nothing to write home about. Stiga hollowed out the handle section of the playing surface underneath the handle scales, but the rebate isn't centred properly on the blade's axis of symmetry (! 🤯).
As it's offset from the Centerline by about 2-3mm, one side of the handle is inherently thinner and weaker than the other. The glue they're using on their handle scales leaves a lot to be desired too. The off-centre rebate and weak scale glue combined blade would have meant the blade could have snapped on him without warning if I hadn't spotted it (not that it was hard to miss 🙄).
The fact this blade left the factory in this state tells me two things:
1. Stiga aren't using a CNC router to hollow out their handle scales. This was done on a regular router, and one with poorly adjusted jig stops at that -- a CNC machine or properly aligned router jig would not have made such an error possible.
2. Their internal quality control is really poor. Whomever is inspecting their blades at the factory between stages really dropped the ball on this one!
