Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Avalox 989D Ball machine Pt 2

Well I've finally found some time to muck around with the ball machine, and I'm quite happy with it! The manual could certainly have a lot more information though!

The head with the 2 spinning wheels can rotate 90deg, so you can do topspin, chop, pure sidespin and a combination of them. To get topspin I just pointed the head over the net, put the bottom wheel to 0 and the top wheel to about 4. This gave pretty decent topspin, great for practice. Higher setting I'll play with later, since I would need to adjust the head a little to keep the ball on the table.

It took me a while to work out how to get backspin. You need to point the head down onto the table on the machine's side, then make it bounch over the net. the top wheel need to be set to 0, and the bottom wheel anywhere between about 3-9. It produce a lot of backspin on higher settings, and even on lower settings it had enough backspin to give me trouble to loop them over the net.

The head can move from side to side, either spitting out ball to fixed or random positions. This seem to work quite well too. I had a good practice session against topspin, really moving me around.

The spin and height of the balls is not exactly the same everytime (but close), which is actually good since it makes me watch the ball better.

I have not yet tried no-spin balls, but I'm sure it can do this quite easily. Being a long pimple player this feature is alos important.

I have not yet tried to move the head post up or down, and I'm not sure if it's meant to be adjustable, but I'll try that next time.

I'm really happy with the machine now, since it can do the main things tht i want it to do. I'll have to experiment more to see what else it can do.

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