Let's Talk About Blade Thickness
1
On “blade thickness,” the main considerations are two issues. One is whether you can drive through. The other is the trade-off between spin and speed. Whether you can drive through — basically, a hands-on try tells you roughly. For example, with the same structure, the Tomokazu Harimoto ALC and Ovtcharov ALC: the former 6.0mm, the latter 6.2mm; the thicker is harder to drive through. If you cannot drive through, with insufficient power, you easily drop the ball. When you want to control, you cannot. Also, a thick blade is generally faster in pace-borrowing rebound. But the thinner one adds spin better, because it more easily produces deformation. For example, if both can be driven through, and you mainly push-attack or emphasize speed more, the thicker one suits better. But if spin is first for you, prioritize the thinner one. (The Heima-tuned KLC, with a power ply thicker than the 968, has better backhand explosiveness.)
2
On the 968’s thickness choice, this can be considered too. Over 6mm, it really is not as transparent as below 6mm, not as easy to add spin. But the backhand’s pace-borrowing and power-adding are firmer. If you fear the 968’s backhand is too meaty, you can indeed choose a bit thicker. The Stiga CL is more extreme. Once, a CL as thin as 6.4mm was seen as a loop god-blade. But the quantity then was too small. So people like me turned to the thinner Donic UP. Now many seven-ply all-wood blades, to suit “loop-ification,” are made not too thick, like the Banda Offensive (measured 6.08) and Chunli (measured 6.2). Most CL are still over 6.5 now. If you are a pips player, you really should choose thicker, for fuller support, to ramp up speed.
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Exactly how thick a blade is — because of the “flatness” issue, we generally measure at least three points and take an average. For example, one point measures 5.9, another 5.8, another close to 6.0. For not-too-expensive blades, this is very normal. 0.2mm thickness errors are everywhere. Does this affect play? The higher the level, the more sensitive perhaps. Kasumi Ishikawa types, we discussed, can hit out blind whether it is the same batch. At the Butterfly player-issue level, most have fairly high precision — say a thickness difference among points of 0.03mm, which is quite scary. I even think there is chance involved, since I have only played a few player issues. But on the Super Zhang 70th Anniversary Limited, the flatness was also very good, with very small error. This shows it is controllable to a degree — it depends on whether you take it seriously. It is not that pricier blades have higher flatness. Pricier may naturally be better. It also depends on the brand. Yinhe, Fengji and now Aster (whose own brand is Recter) are currently a notch above domestically. Flatness affects the uniformity of elasticity and the sweet spot. Suppose at different points of the face, the striking elasticity and sweet-spot feedback do not differ much — that surely brings higher error-tolerance and more grounded striking quality. For lower-level players who often cannot drive through the rubber, the impact is relatively smaller. The higher the level, theoretically, the pickier you can be.