Question about Hinoki Blades :-)

[Wakkibatty]

@ Wakkibatty:

I tried to contact you with pm 2 days ago, but I did not get ana reaction up to now.
Can you tell me the price of such a Skölla blade (shipping to Germany included)?
Unfortunately there isn`t any price information on your website.

Check your PMs. 😊😊

 

[Wakkibatty]

Th

Thanks again Wakkibatty. Do you have any experience with T05 FX? On my cheap butterfly jpen, I've been using that rubber for a few months now and believe the sponge is too soft as I feel it is bottoming out too easily. I bought a hinoki one ply blade that I've just received today and plan to change both blades rubbers to T05 hard tomorrow. This way I can compare the difference in feel between T05FX and T05H on the same blade, and between different blades with the same rubber. I had given up on T05FX but maybe after a few months of use I should give it another shot but this time on my hinoki one ply?

Also, I don't muck around with sponge thickness, I just go max everytime. Thanks to your comment though, maybe I'll experiment with it in the future but I don't see myself doing so anytime soon. But your comment about the blade thickness (what a 0.2mm increase in blade thickness can do) has me intrigued. I ordered a 10mm thick hinoki blade, should I go thicker in the future? Would the difference between 10mm and 10.2mm be noticeable? Or even between 10mm and 12mm? What's the limit? How far should I go? I'm now thinking of wanting a 20mm thick blade 😂.

Never tried T05FX sorry so don't know a thing about it...though if the sponge is a LOT softer than your stock standard T05 then conceivably it might be better attuned to Hinoki / high rebound softwoods.

As for a 10mm vs a 10.2mm blade thickness I honestly doubt it would make a big difference at all.

(NB: I appreciate that sounds like I'm contradicting myself there, but I'm not really when you think about it in terms of percentages, accumulative values, and average blade thickness.

Once again, A 0.2mm difference doesn't sound like a lot, and that's because it's not.... but let's think about that difference in terms of Blade thickness for a bit.

If your entire blade is 5.5mm thick, then adding 0.2mm of thickness means you're increasing the blade's total volume by about 3.6% proportionally speaking. On a 10mm blade however, going from 10mm to 10.2mm results in a much lower percentage increase in volume proportionately, so you get a much lower speed boost, as diminishing returns become a factor once you get over a certain thickness threshold.

Also, as I said earlier, high density softwoods work like the gas pedal on a car, in that they can provide a lot of the blade's speed and hitting power, and the more you have if them in a blade, the faster the blade gets.

If you examine the construction of most blades out there in detail, you quickly realize that high rebound and semi-high rebound softwoods (Hinoki, Western red cedar, Douglas fir, spruce etc...) are most often found in the medial layers of a blade.

Given that the medial layers in a blade are all typically pretty thin, any increase here has the potential to have a disproportionately large effect on blade performance, despite its low total proportion of blade volume.

For example, if a medial layer of high rebound softwood in a blade (eg: spruce) is 1mm thick, and you then increase it by 0.2mm so its total thickness is 1.2mm, that's basically a 20% increase to the volume of the blade's main power plant.

That extra volume doesn't just add extra bounce through making a springy high rebound wood layer thicker mind you, it also adds to the total torsional stiffness of the blade in general. This in turn increases the blade's overall resistance to deflection, thereby making the blade more direct in the process. That in turn also then directly feeds into your blade's overall speed potential via simple mechanical leverage. (Plus of course there's also the fact you've added extra mass to the blade in general as well, which can also boost its rebound speed.

Long story short, all these factors together can potentially act as combined set of force multipliers that can turbo boost your total blade speed if the changes aren't done judiciously.

So basically, whenever you're adding extra volume / thickness to a blade's medial layers, it usually pays to do so in the smallest margins of change that are possible.... Any massive changes in this area of a blade will only destabilize the end result, through simply having too much of a good thing.