Hello sir,
Thank you for your long detailed experience, it is very helpful.
I will send it to our designer.
In my personal experience, I use Dizzy OX on the all-wood (defensive) side for blocking. Since this side has a pure wood structure with a Balsa core, the blocks tend to have a slightly higher and shorter arc. On the other hand, the heavy carbon offensive side produces a lower arc and extremely fast first speed, performing similarly to the Cannon Carbon.
Notably, I often rotate my racket during play. For example, when my opponent gets used to the defensive side’s trajectory, I switch to the offensive side for a powerful punch block, catching them off guard. Of course, this tactic is only effective against players at a lower level than me.
Best regards,
Thank you for sharing your perspective Andrea 🙂 I must say, the idea of twiddling with a two speed blade is an intriguing one, and I can see the potential appeal.
I myself have avoided using asymmetric dual-density blades personally, for the reasons I outlined in my post. All the customers I have made similar blades for in the past, were universally doing so to gain better control on one wing, as opposed to generating disruption. But you asked for our thoughts and experiences with two sided blades in general, so I thought I would share my own experiences in the hope they might be useful
All that being said, you make an excellent point -- I can conceive that a dual density blade might theoretically be very well suited to a spin negation / disruption playing style. 🤔
I find myself wondering though if a blade specifically and solely designed for slight asymmetric flex (as opposed to designed for dual densities) might be a better fit for that purpose 🤔🤔
It seems to me the two separate densities and hardnesses of the blade shown in your opening post, would definitely assist with disruption, but it might also (again this is in theory) overly interfere with a player's sense of touch 🤔 (your observation you choose to *punch* after twiddling (as opposed to using defter, more deceitful touch based strokes) seems to support the idea it's hard to have deft touch after momentarily changing the hardness of your playing outers by twiddling.
I acknowledge that people -- given enough time -- can and will adjust to the idiosyncracies of twiddling with a dual hardness blade, but by the same logic, given enough time they can also adjust to doing so in the *absence* of two different densities as well... (I imagine it might also be a quicker process too, but in the absence of any data either way, it would be difficult to say categorically. 🤔)
Moving on, I note you mentioned your engineer was curious about people's feelings about increasing the proportion of balsa in the blade's core. From what I can gather, they are contemplating this idea to potentially slow down the defensive side.
For what it's worth Andrea, In my own opinion, I personally doubt that increasing the proportion of balsa in the core
in isolation will make that much of a difference, or give you the results you want. Really, it very much depends on what
other changes your engineer also intends to make to the other surrounding layers
If you increase the amount of balsa in the core,
without adjusting the other core and medial layers to suit, it will most likely only result in a slightly thicker and faster blade, with a slightly stiffer core....and here's why:
As I intimated in my earlier post, there are a plethora of engineering problems you need to solve to build a dual-density blade. Trying to resolve most of these problems tends have the accumulative effect or outcome, of pushing you towards:
1. thickening the core to add stiffness and/or,
2. Adding more balsa.
As balsa is such a stiff and light wood, adding more of it is a tempting and obvious option to solve your problems regarding both stiffening the blade, and insulating the two different density zones from each other.
Balsa naturally resists the transmission of vibrations -- this is why balsa-cored blades typically have very little feedback / vibration during play compared to denser cores like Ayous, and is why it's so useful as a sound / vibration insulator.
However, adding more balsa is a double edged sword when building twin-density blades, because of the balsa effect.
Balsa is widely known to have a non-linear impact response curve (ie: it's hugely bouncy stuff).
This is why balsa blades are so popular with blockers / pips out players -- the balsa layers provide enormous rebound speed when blocking, (especially when teamed with an accommodating outer like koto).
Furthermore, the thicker your balsa is, the greater a blade's rebound speed becomes.
Because balsa is such a stiff wood at thicker dimensions, this feature also helps contribute to this extra rebound speed via reduced flex (blade flex partially absorbs impact forces through temporary plastic deformations).
Here however, your engineer seems to want to add extra balsa in the hope it will have a cushioning effect, and absorb some impact forces due to its comparative softness, and thereby slow down the blade. 🤔
I hate to be a downer here Andrea, but I very much doubt that will work at all.
Its my personal and professional opinion, that adding more balsa (if anything) is actually more likely to
speed the slow side up, rather than slow it down.
The reason for this is thick Balsa layers don't insulate each side by
absorbingb impact forces and/or vibration s... -- they
resist and reflect them instead.
If balsa
absorbed impact forces, then thick balsa blades like the Donic Cayman or Dr Neubauer High Technology would not have the fantastic blocking speed they do.
Furthermore, the thicker the balsa is, the better it is at reflecting impact forces back towards the outer layer.
In the ply composition above, I note you don't mention how thick each individual layer is (and I don't blame you).
If that balsa layer is already 2.5mm thick or over, I strongly suspect making it thicker will only speed the blade up from within, by reflecting more impact forces back towards the ball.
I strongly recommend if you're going to increase the amount of balsa, I would also take a long hard look at the surrounding layers as well.
(Hint for your engineer: IMO at least, there's a MUCH better way to manage your impact forces than thickening the tertiary balsa layer in search of a cushioning effects. If I were you, I'd be looking pretty hard at that beech layer instead, and start asking yourself why using beech under ebony might possibly be a bad idea in this instance... 😉👌 )
In any respect Andrea, your observation you can twiddle with the blade above to vary the throw angle, flight path and spin levels is still an excellent observation nonetheless, 🙂🙂(it's also sparked a few tangential ideas for me in some of my own current blade-dev projects that might be worth investigating, so thank you very much for the Inspiration 😂).
Thank you very much also Andrea most sincerely, for sharing this discussion about Sanwei's blade development with us all, and for being willing to converse with us all so openly. 😊
Really hope you guys get some useful feedback from it -- from my perspective at least, it's been genuinely fascinating discussion thus far. 🙂
this is Andrea!🙋♂️
