Table Tennis-reloaded
// January 30th, 2011 // Comments Off // Rants
This has been something as constant as my Taekwondo, Darts and Billiards.
I’m not any good at any of them as far as world standards are concerned…but I would say that I’m not THAT terrible at them…well…May be I am.
The table at the Academy has inspired me to pick a racket up and play. This is great, I get to do my daily exercise and it’s something I love doing.
So what exactly did I get myself?
For the blade, I got the Galaxy Carbon T-2, labeled as an attack/loop type blade, it is composed of 5 plys. 3 plys of which are made of Juniper, and two plys from carbon (sandwiched between the 3 plys of wood). I will get out of my way and say this Juniper thing is a farce. There is no such thing as Juniper cultivation in China. They have a lot of babies (Juniper berries are used by the Navajo as a female contraceptive)…Culpeper wouldn’t have been happy. Gin, isn’t the favored drink in China…(yes, Juniper berries are also used as the main flavoring for Gin (and responsible for gin’s name, which is a shortening of the Dutch word for juniper, genever).
So…I would have to say that this marvelous piece of fake wood and carbon product would most likely be made from Cypress and Carbon…which really matters very little to me.
On a scale of 12, this paddle is rated at 10 for speed. This means it’s very fast…Cypress is a pretty hard and stiff wood…together with a carbon layer on each side, I’m pretty sure this would be something you can smash a rock with.
The control rating for the blade is 8, this is to be expected since with speed, you lose control.
The more surprising thing about this to me, is the fact that when I finally got to do some research on it, people that have used it, scored it an even 9 for speed and 9 for control. That isn’t bad at all for a $20 piece of shit.
Weighing in at a very light 78 grams, it is very light…like I said, not a bad piece of shit for $20.
Now…like almost everything that deals with Life…the deciding factor is always the rubber. When you buy a car, you always look for A. a watershed tire for diving in tropical countries…it sheds a lot of water giving you a lot of contact with the pavement…it saves your life. B. A performance rubber when you are in a place like the middle east where the roads are built the way they should be, as god intended roads to be (applicable only to certain parts of Dubai), you get to see the cars spraying water all over when it rains… the main difference with A and B is that you buy that so you wont die…it’s prohibitive. Which is in stark contrast with our point C. Condoms…bad rubbers or good rubbers, when it pops, something lives.
I am a cheap bastard not because I want to be…but because I’m broke. So…I had to look for rubbers that were at par with the ones I’ve used back in the day.
Enter Reactor Thunder – Just like the performance tires used here in Dubai, the rubber is rated at 12-12-12 by the table tennis community. Even if the manufacturer’s specs puts this in at 11.5(speed) 11(spin)(11(control)
Just like any other condom, it comes with a price – at $9.90 something must be wrong…and there is. WEIGHT. this is probably one of the heaviest rubbers out there.
It should make the light Blade balance out well with the weight of the rubber though.
For me, this is something I had to get to be able to play relatively well, maybe not as it was in my younger years, but I really hate making excuses when I lose matches…especially excuses about gear. What I truly lack is practice and the hunger to win, like it was in the old days.
I had fun playing with some guys over at the Academy. I think, If I’m able to share what I’ve learned before, it would be great…then I would have some guys to play some pretty good games with.