Update on the experiment with different cleaners

Well I proceeded to give the old rubber a real, good coating of the same olive oil. It take about 15min before it started to soak on several places on the surface.

As recommended by those mentioned before, the oil should be spread out again to prevent some minor markings on the surface. The next day I checked the rubber and there were no marks, and all the oil had been soaked up.

Testing the rubber the next day showed the rejuvination processes worked really well. Although it did not feel as good as a new rubber, it felt better than a rubber with just a good clean...

I would not recommend you use this procedure on a regular basis, as I suspect it may soften the topsheet more and more, and will make the rubber heavier as well. But for a occasional good clean it seemed to work really well! Plus it's cheap and every tends to have this in their kitchen... according to others most vegetable oils work well, so I don't think it needs to olive oil.

Experimenting with different cleaners

I've heard many stories of players and friends using all sort of liquids to clean or rejuvinate their rubbers. I decided to put some of these to the test.

I found an old rubber (Dawei Sprungfeder A-4) which has had a lot of use and is well worn. It's now totally non-tacky and has even lost a lot of it's grip... feels quite smooth.

As you can see below I have divided up the rubber into 4 sections with masking tape, each section can be treated with a different cleaner so that we can compare the results. I know water will not revive this rubber, so I won't use this as a test.



Here are the 4 cleaners I decided to use:



I used a seperate cotton cloth to wipe the liquids in. In hindside something less absorbing and lint-free would have been better, but I don't think it will affect the results.

Thanks goes to hookshot, pongcrazy, LawOCG and a few other (see forum thread, sorry if I missed you) for all the excellent suggestions and advice.

The results are not as conclusive as I had hoped... all seem to work quite well:

Nittuku rubber cleaning foam:
The foam makes it real easy to apply and does not spill easy so less chance of a mess. It gave a good clean, restoring some of it's grippiness but no real tack. It changed the look of the rubber very little.

Orange power:
Since it's a spray it's a little messy, but it smells so good I was tempted to just keep using it Very Happy Laughing Very Happy . It does soak into the cloth and/or evaporate real quick, so I had to spray a few more times so that I could really rub the complete surface before it dried. As with the foam, it gave a good clean, restoring some of it's grippiness but no real tack. It changed the look of the rubber very little. It let some orange stains on the cloth.

WD40:
Since it's a spray it's a little messy. It smells a little toxic, so it may well have some nasties in it. It does soak into the cloth and/or evaporate real quick, so I had to spray a few more times so that I could really rub the complete surface before it dried. As with the foam, it gave a good clean, restoring some of it's grippiness but no real tack. It changed the look of the rubber very little.

Olive oil:
Since I had to pour some drop onto the rubber, it got a little messy too. I spread it around covering it with a very light layer. It seem to absorb quite quite quickyl As it was dry in about half the surface, I wiped it around a little more with the cloth which was still oily to cover it some more. It soaked in after about 10mins. This was seemed slighly better, and actually made the surface look a little better too. It will need some applications to see what more it can do.

So from this I conclude that for easy of use, I recommend the foam as it gives a good clean as any, and is the least messy. The oil gives the best result, and further and more oil may will offer better results again, but it's obviously not as good for a quick clean. For most enjoyable experience, the orange power wins hands down, since it smells so delicious! heh heh...

I will treat the whole rubber with a thicker layer of oil again, to see how much more I can do with it...

Table tennis videos

I'm working on making a collection of YouTube videos, and organising them all on a series of web pages. YouTube videos are good in that that are easy to embed into any webpages, and you don't have to download the video to see it.

I'd like to organise the pages into catagories of Defenders, attackers and clips from some of the all-time greats and some of the current top players. I would also like to set aside a section for videos of us novices, so that you can share with others...

This is what I've collected so far (I've only just started): Table tennis videos

If you have any comments or suggestions on this, it would be very much appreciated! Also if you have some of your own table tennis related videos on YouTube and would like it to be shown on the website, please send me the links.

This is fun!!!