Pasting Your Table Tennis Rubber

 

To buy MARK V HPS, click on the image.

Here we will find out how best to paste your table tennis rubber on the blade of your racket. It is actually quite easy to paste the pips rubber with little or no sponge. Let's find out how to paste the sandwich rubber, which presents more of a challenge. Understand that how you paste your rubber is going to make a BIG impact on its performance. This fact, unfortunately, is not so much appreciated - except for professional level players. And they would much rather keep it SECRET.

The best technique for pasting your rubber is going to be discussed now. We are not going to look at exotic glues available in the market that will enhance the performance of the rubber. Instead, we will look at the BEST way to paste the sandwich rubber using ANY glue that you find satisfactory.

Before you start, make sure that you have your backhand and forehand sandwich rubbers as well as racket ready. Get for yourself two pieces of SMOOTH and identical rectangular glass sheets of medium thickness. They should be sufficiently large to cover the area of the blade. Also, keep a razor blade (rather than a sharp knife) ready. I prefer razor blade because it does the job much more neatly and efficiently compared to a knife. Get hold of a fat book or any object of similar weight. It should be of medium weight and not overly heavy.

Now apply the glue to the exposed sponge of one of the rubbers. Apply glue to one of the surfaces of the blade of your racket. Gently ease the sandwich rubber onto the blade. Apply NO pressure on the pasted rubber at all. Now invert the rubber you have pasted onto one of the glass sheets. Take the razor blade and clip out the extra rubber neatly. Use the same procedure for the other rubber and blade surface.

What we have done here is just pasted the two rubber sheets onto the blades surfaces. The reason for NOT applying pressure is to prevent the inverted pips molded into the sponge from getting STRESSED. A stressed sandwich rubber will not be able to perform that efficiently.

Now, placed the two glass sheets on either side of the racket, with the handle protruding out and place the whole thing on a table. Keep the fat book or something else on top of the upper glass slab. Let the pasting process continue for about 10 hours or so. Take care NOT to try out the racket in the meantime - maybe out of curiosity. For example, one nice way is to do the pasting is at night before going to bed. This way you can leave the pasting process undisturbed. You can use the racket when you wake up in the morning.

After the requisite number of hours have passed, take out the racket and look at the two surfaces of the pasted rubbers horizontally. You should see no undulations whatsoever. This is desirable. The glass sheets have done their job.

Now bounce a table tennis ball with the racket to test out both the rubbers. You should hear a DULL thud when the ball bounces. This is also desirable. If you had applied too much weight during the pasting, you would have heard a SHARP thud. More high frequency than you are hearing now. This is NOT desirable. It means you have managed to stress out the inverted pips of the sandwich rubbers. In other words, you have almost ruined the rubbers. You can still play with your racket, of course, but your performance will be POOR. For example, your top spin will not have the same BITE.

Professional players take care to paste their rubbers lightly over the blade surfaces. Now you know how to do the same. Hope you enjoy playing with your new racket.