Despite all the new high tech materials now available it is impossible to manufacture a flawless racquet. Any racquet is as good as the quality of the mold used. There are no molds in use by any racquet manufacturer that are even close to precision tolerances. For example you will find many plastic tumblers that look round but they leak if you have water in it. The reason is that both the tumbler cover and the body are not perfectly round. American Tupperware makes plastic tumblers with a higher precision and they do not leak, but they charge a much higher price. The difference is due to the molds used. Tupperware molds used for making tumblers are huge machines, precision made in Switzerland, and they 'spit' out a tumbler cover at an agonizing slow rate. Cheaper molds can churn out the same cover at 100 times that rate. Racquet molds are not precision molds and that is the reason why the final product is at most 80% of its efficiency.
One major flaw is that no racquet made todate can be perfectly symmetrical. This adversely affects a racquet's face stability, not unlike having the racquet face slide to one side when smashing. Asymmetry exists everywhere, left vs right, top vs reverse side, etc. Even the simple shaft is not truly round at any spot.
There is a price if you want to have a perfect or almost perfect racket. Computerized laser molding can be a solution. But then its just not wise to do.
But really, no racket is ever flawless - a perfect racket would also play flawlessly and you can't really even define that, let alone do it.
So true.. It just puzzles me how we can discuss the making of a perfect racket before knowing what it really is. Irrelevant trivia: most plasticware makers use an 'O'ring or similar soft expandable material to achieve a seal. My tupperware water jug uses the latter concept.
There can't ever be a perfect racquet, everyone is different, so it can't possibly suit everyone. But I might be completely missing the point . A perfect *form* though, if that's what you mean? Apart from there being no such thing as *true* prefection, yeah I guess you could get closer to it. Would it make that much difference though?
You only have to get a few racquets of the same brand, weight, strings, b/p, etc. and they will all play differently. Hold one racquet with its face facing one way and it will play differently vs being held with its face facing the other way. The graphite that racquet manufacturers buy from graphite manufacturers have gone through precision manufacture with some being the end product of 3,000 degrees C 'cooking'. All the racquet manufacturers do is to use a cut length of the prepag and insert it into a cast iron mold and bake it. Even the surfaces of the molds are rough, with not a single mold a true mirror-image between one side vs the opposite side. If they use 500 molds in one baking session, all the 500 molds will have imperfections different from each other. Some racquets are really bad. Even Yonex is poor here although better than many others. This may not pose problems with tennis or squash racquets, but it can become a problem with very light badminton racquets. AOTBE, oval shape racquets are better than iso shape ones. If they can solve this problem, we can then expect to see very light racquets of less tha 80g capable of more power than today's less-than-perfect 2U racquets.
Despite all these imperfections, players like Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan can still smash and hit the lines at great percentage and accuracy... Really scary to think what they can do with a perfect racquet...
IMHO. it is impossible to make a flawless racket because no one know what a flawless racket really means. and if one do manage to define what it means (and of course, have everyone agree on the definition), you will have to convince everyone that it is really something that matters and something that anyone should lose any sleep on. despite saying that, i think it is an interesting academic exercise to try to figure out what it is and what can be done to achieve it.
It is not impossible to make a perfect racket "technically" with the right balance etc... provided the company have funds to make those rackets for retail. But then as players we are not all perfect in our technique and skills anyway.. whether we are beginners or Pro level.
Good to know that rackets can still improve for the future, and a nice topic i'll have a chat to an engineering friend about, cheers.
Taneepak, when you use the term 'flaws' do you mean structural flaws in the racket? Or do you mean flaws in the sense that each racket will be slightly different from the next?
think the difference in weight will have much greater effect on tennis racquet because they can vary about 20 + grams. On the other hand badminton racquets difference of only few grams would have smaller difference to people.
i think a couple of grams in a badminton racket has quite a bit of effect. what taneepak is saying here though, is probably the difference of 0.001 grams, and a imperfection of 0.001mm that makes it flawed.
Instead of looking for perfection in a racket. I think we just have to improve our own skills and technique first and get the 2nd best Racket next to perfect to use. Get a reliable brand that is back up with R&D and not Copy Cats.
How do you actually know this? If the moulds are CNC'd - and I can't see how they wouldn't be - then how in heck can they be asymetrical? The variation in weight between rackets that are supposed to be the same seem like acceptable manufacturing tolerances to me. Are bandminton rackets really that badly made? I'd really love to see some examples.
I have 5 different racquets that all show the surfaces of the molds, and some are rather rough. It is not the variation in weight but its uneven distribution. If you hit well this makes a lot of difference in racquet face stability. If you don't hit well, it makes no difference. There is one way to find out. Send me your best racquet w/o strings with return postage costs, and I think I can improve on it. It will take me a few days.
changing a racquet from the current armortec or ti-10 to say, a "flawless" one would make only like a 1 percent of difference in the game since the current racquets we use are relatively close to perfect as it is and plus flawless racquets are even more impossible to make because you can always better something. perhaps in the future we'll replace graphite and after that we'll replace what we used to replace graphite...
