Tibhar Balsa Allround 50

A balsa core blade with rather unique playing characteristics. Workmanship is of high quality, and the flared handle is thick and rectangular, which provides very comfortable grip. Physically, the blade has an over 8mm impressive thickness, of which, the balsa core is only 5mm thick. The woods used for the upper plies is fineline (not an actual wood species), which doesn't seem to be really hard and dense, and its thickness helps to provide some feeling and a good touch on slow hits. The blade is definitely stiff (it produces noticeably high pitched sound on ball impact with mild vibrations), but the surface is not hard. I think, it is somewhat misleading to rate it as an "allround" blade, as it exhibits very high dynamics. For slow ball impacts, there is almost no catapult response from the blade, making it a dream to play drop shots and pushes with various lengths, but dwell time is at most average. Adding pace reveals the potential of the thick balsa core though, with steep, but gradual increase in response. At the higher gears, this blade even enables playing at solid OFF speeds, but a drastic reduction is noticeable in dwell time, which will mean, that looping ability will mostly depend on the installed rubbers and your wrist technique. Thus, the blade does not really favor looping playing style. When you loop with it, expect very flat and long trajectories. The blade's top speed is enough for stepping away a bit from the table, but then, looping will be even more difficult due to the short dwell time. For players, who prefer varying pace suddenly, and win points by fast hits and precise placements (short pips users?), this could be a good blade to try. (My setup only consists of inverted rubbers though, weighing 171g in total out of the box (but three months later, 163g as the balsa core lost water) - I have Victas VJ 07 Stiff max. on FH and VJ 07 Limber max. on BH. With these rubbers, the blade feels perfectly balanced, and it is easy for my wrists.)

It is a light blade, faster than an usual allround, play more like an off- blade.