Wood Ratings

This is my attempt at ratings my blades using the Butterfly scale. The Schlager Carbon was used as the reference blade, so all measurements were normalized to its response. A big thanks to seasterl, a fellow club member, physicist, and EJ who was nice enough to develop and perform the tests.

The test was a simple drop test where a ball was dropped from a known height onto the secured and stationary blade. The vertical rebound of the ball was video taped with a height indicator in the background. The camera was also positioned so as to eliminate parallax between the ball and the scale and obtain accurate readings. The maximum rebound of multiple drops was measured and the test was repeated to ensure reproducible results. The height of the drop was fourteen feet so as to maximize the spread of the measurements between the blades (as opposed to a height of only a few feet that would be too dependent on the blade's outer ply and might skew the results). Although somewhat subjective, the feel of the blade was determined by actually playing with the blade. If anyone has ideas on how to do a simple yet reproducible dynamic test where the ball is moving at a very high rate of speed and a blade moves during a loop stroke, please email me. Similar tests have been performed during the evaluation of other sporting goods, so coming up with an objective test to further evaluate a blade's performance should be possible.