Many of us in Seattle use 78 (summer) and 79 (winter). We use 78 in WA Open and 79 in WA closed tournament.
I dunno but it wasn't winter time yet when Mike/Brooke were still around brought in the 79's from the BBC. Just doing a serve was self-explanatory! It flew way too fast!! Most of the time 78's should be used. At times when I'm at North Sea Tac, some of the people bring in shuttles which is too slow.
Today, I found people at the BBC here were using Victor Green 79's that were just slightly faster than my 50-rated shuttles which I THOUGHT were 77's but are apparently more like 78's. Is it possible that the same rated speed can vary by brand, also? Either that, or the correlation between the two scales is not exact. In short, I am more enlightened than before this discussion, but remain confused.
Definately the Victor Green 79's is too fast. I used to use Victor Green 78's which flew about about the correct speeds - some of them needed adjustments. 77 for those, a bit slow. By brand, the weight sort of varies if you measure by scale and stuff.
I did some searching and i found this general classification (from shuttlecock.com): international-metric wt.-grain - speed 1 ------------- 48 ---- 75 - slow, for use in highland 2 ------------- 49 ---- 76 - medium slow, for use in hotter area 3 ------------- 50 ---- 77 - medium, most sea level area 4 ------------- 51 ---- 78 - medium fast, cold area 5 ------------- 52 ---- 79 - fast, cold area, below sea level In this case, the shuttles we use woudl be 76 or 77. Here in Jamaica we don't really refer to the shuttles by the above speed classifications but instead by the colour bands. For lower level tourney and high school competitions and training we tend to use the Mavis 350 plastic shuttles - there isn't much consistency in whether we use white (slower) or yellow (faster). But these are all green banded. In terms of feather shuttles, my coach uses Yonex AS-50's. In the tourneys again there is no consistency in what brand of shuttle is used but are all generally green banded (so i'm guessing around 76). Hope this helps.
