How table tennis rubbers actually work?

[NextLevel]

Showed up in my feed - presented to facilitate discussion.

 

[barusu]

This guy knows how to make a video interesting. Props to him!

 

[NextLevel]

So I watched the video - a lot of it squares with how I understand rubbers, I used to read a blog called "Thoughts on table tennis" that for some reason disappeared, but it was really good IMHO, and helped me build some of my thoughts on how equipment worked. This reminds me a bit of that.

 

[Matt Hetherington]

I think it's a brilliant video, definitely has some different perspectives and is interesting for me from the equipment brand marketing side too.

 

[Archosaurus]

I can give an engineering based perspective from someone who has dealt a lot with elastomer and rubber simulation and validation. It's a completely unrelated field, so you can choose if you think that's useful or not.

IMO:
Some details are omitted, but it's a lot better than the typical kind of content you might find for these kind of topics. I'm sure the omitted details will be included in later episodes because they mostly have to do with load transfer mechanics and grip generation mechanics which can bleed more into the topsheet/pimple geometry discussion.

The grip section is *extremely* simplified but that's probably fine, because you'd need to start getting into load sensitivity, hysteresis in the different axes, viscous and hysteretic damping, contact patch thermals and all that which can be a bit overwhelming and probably won't make sense to players; and also it is anyway difficult to talk about seriously because so little hard data exists to prove anything apart from universal concepts.

I don't have anything to prove or disprove any claims in the video, but they don't seem magical or nonsensical which is usually the case for this kind of content, so it's probably safe to link to someone who needs to learn the basics. I hope he makes more and it would be very cool to see some empirical measurements of these curves some day.

 

[Gozo Zyreruna]

fingers tapping on the table waiting for part deux...

 

[oophyte]

He had a previous one explaining blades too. His concept for his website has a logical framework for analyzing equipment data. However, his input "data" is just lifted from manufacturers' marketing materials, which are better than nothing but hardly worth analyzing, especially for comparison across different brands.

If only we had access to empirical observations on TT equipment to feed into his analysis, then his site would be genuinely brilliant. As it stands now, it's a fancy mansion built on sandy foundations.

 

[Archosaurus]

He had a previous one explaining blades too. His concept for his website has a logical framework for analyzing equipment data. However, his input "data" is just lifted from manufacturers' marketing materials, which are better than nothing but hardly worth analyzing, especially for comparison across different brands.

If only we had access to empirical observations on TT equipment to feed into his analysis, then his site would be genuinely brilliant. As it stands now, it's a fancy mansion built on sandy foundations.

I don't know if tabletennis equipment is similar, but if car tires are anything to go by, you can completely ignore manufacturer reported data. You need empirical measurements and in-use-telemetry to gather any kind of useful information about tires. Then you probably need to build a simulation model with that data to gain insight into the dependencies.

Translation: $$$.

It's not enough just to measure, because the analysis is the hard part, and simulations require a rigorous analysis, so they're useful in confirming the validity of your data and your analysis.

Now I don't think it's that expensive or hard to make a dyno for table tennis measurements. You could get the force/deflection curve that way. Measuring it in transient would be more difficult, but you can simply just shoot a ball at a sheet and measure the coefficient of restitution at different impact velocities and angles to get an idea. You'd only really need to measure the velocity for that, which you can do optically. Plenty of research papers have done this, but you'd need to measure a lot of models then build a simulator to start gaining true insight into the numerical part.

A physics-based approach is also valid and that's mostly what I use, but it's unvalidated if all you're going off is assumptions about properties without actually correlating the model to something very specific.

 

[Tyce]

He had a previous one explaining blades too. His concept for his website has a logical framework for analyzing equipment data. However, his input "data" is just lifted from manufacturers' marketing materials, which are better than nothing but hardly worth analyzing, especially for comparison across different brands.

If only we had access to empirical observations on TT equipment to feed into his analysis, then his site would be genuinely brilliant. As it stands now, it's a fancy mansion built on sandy foundations.

Ah I thought I recognized that face from something. Guess I can skip this video

 

[victormanriquey]

Yes very good video indeed, he explains difficult concepts in a nice video, things like gears, catapult, why some rubbers (i.e. hard and tacky) need thicker/harder contacts, etc.

Kudos to him, video is also very nice to listen and watch

 

[Tyce]

I mean sure, the video makes sense in a general kind of way and that's fine. But in the end he's just trying to push his AI-generated website "tool" that really doesn't do anything. Most of the buttons don't even actually work. So yes, another push of AI slop.

 

[victormanriquey]

I mean sure, the video makes sense in a general kind of way and that's fine. But in the end he's just trying to push his AI-generated website "tool" that really doesn't do anything. Most of the buttons don't even actually work. So yes, another push of AI slop.

Thats also true Just tested and indeed its very bare bones still.

 

[Silver smasher]

This is a good video to show to new players to explain why some rubbers are suitable and some only for advanced players. Like many others I thought a expensive rubber used by top players would improve my game but a softer, more controllable, version would have been better.
I hope in his follow up video he gives suggestions of rubbers suitable for different types of players.

 

[jk1980]

The activation window is a fine concept but deriving it from manufacturer data is insanity, especially if you highlight android as good example for specifying a valuable metric.

 

[Archosaurus]

Ah I thought I recognized that face from something. Guess I can skip this video

I have a lot more problems with the blade video. He got some things right, like the thing about the bending radius and whatever, but other things just don't seem to make sense from a FEA/measurement perspective nor from a playing perspective. There's more magical thinking in that video and non-physics-based ideas which wouldn't hold water if you measured or simulated it. I'd have to rewatch it to remember which ones, but that's my impression.

I guess the rubber video might be much the same, but rubbers are tremendously more complicated than blades are, so there could be some perception bias going on due to the general lack of understanding about them.

The activation window is a fine concept but deriving it from manufacturer data is insanity, especially if you highlight android as good example for specifying a valuable metric.

I've got some problems with it in the physics based sense; there's not that much difference being in or out of the window from a purely numerical perspective. It's largely just different slopes for gains. It's not super far from the subjective playing experience, though.