table tennis rubber
TT energy
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I will be discussing table tennis rubber types, reviews, ratings, ranking in relation to thickness, hardness and weight and finally glue and buying on sale.
The bigger picture on table tennis rubber reviews
Table tennis rubber reviews often come down to whether or not the manufacturers ratings are correct. 
There are a number of table tennis websites which have come up with various methods for getting user based ratings and then ranking them from the database. Although I was once excited about the concept of this, in my opinion, the information presented is far off the truth. Primarily because you cannot leave the task of rating aspects of rubber to beginner. Anyone can go in rate as you will. There is nothing to stop the companies going in there and over ranking a rubber for monetary gain also. The solution to all of this is seeing is believing. Youtube has many videos that show either directly how a rubber plays or shows which rubbers the players are playing. You can see the way ball plays and how you need to play to use it. It is not just the top 100 players but also players of all levels that post their rally videos, most of them would love the question as a comment "what rubber were using and what did you think of it? in that video."
It is often easy to find out about the types of table tennis rubbers, ranging from offensive, looping and driving rubbers with more grip to less spinny rubbers which are more 
defensive, to pips out rubber, for out right hitting or chopping. It's much better now, as in the past they had to take into account how they played with glue also.
If you are buying premade paddles the table tennis racket rubber types are almost always cheap rubbers that nobody would buy seperately. If they are inverted, then they will probably be more on the control end, with very little speed or spin. There are some very cheap tacky versions which often tend to be almost impossible to play with. So be carefull!
I think tenergy05.com has more butterfly table tennis rubber reviews toward their latest products than any other so let's just say, sign up so you can access the search function to what review you are after. I have also a very popular comparison between xiom Vega and tenergy 05 that you can't miss in any search. I have also quickly reviewed xiom Europe omega IV 4 and was not impressed at all, to me it is another hexer kind of rubber. As for Adidas table tennis rubber review you will not
find it here as I will not buy a sheet to test something which from all the reviews I have heard sound unremarkable. I really wish there were more people to let me know what they think of their products or if Adidas read this please send me a trial rubber. :)
For me the most important and objective thing I want to know in any review is the weight and how that is distributed through the topsheet, pips and sponge.
table tennis rubber weight
The weight of your rubber will come down to the thickness, hardness and glue. (see the following headings) The weight will change how your stroke plays and how quickly you can move the raquet. The overall heavier bat feels more stable, often making your stroke more fluid. A bat to heavy will mean you need to do shorter strokes to have time to recover also. A bat too light means an incoming ball might change the angle of your bat if you hold it lightly and also means the bat will vibrate more in your hand.
table tennis rubber thickness
The thickness of the rubber is usually solely dependent on the sponge with only small degree of difference for the topsheet stuck to the sponge. In that small difference of height in the pip length and the actual thickness of the topsheet there is a big variety of how the ball plays.
The sponge thickness can vary from zero or no sponge to about 2.3 mm. This main factor in thickness allows the player to transfer either more speed or power or spin into the bal l with more control more consistently. It dictates the main stroke: if it is thinner then you will hit more or thicker you'll have the choice to hit or loop (brush into the ball more). Power comes from the player of course, not the rubber. If you use a piece of wood to hit into the ball you'd almost only be able to transfer your muscle into the speed of the ball if it were contacted at a point higher the net height. Drawing an almost straight line. A thicker rubber would give you a chance to catch the ball under the top of the net height and still send energy in the form of speed and spin.
This thickness of the sponge is also directly related to the overall feeling of hardness. Hardness in terms of feeling the blade beneath the sponge. If you have a thin sponge you will feel the blade under the sponge more. There will be less of a dampening effect.
table tennis rubber hardness
The hardness of the rubber should get rated on the topsheet, pip structure and sponge hardness. Individual series of rubbers or table tennis companies often overlook this, for example: Butterfly has one rating which only seems to take into account the sponge density as the sole factor in hardness. When in reality if you take for example tenergy 64 and tenergy 25 (both have the same hardness ratings), you will see that 25 is harder due not to a difference in sponge or topsheet but because there is more mass in the form of pip width. Similarly you could have a much harder sponge such as the one with spin art and then put a thinner topsheet with much thinner pips and get a similar density.
Finally the type of actual chemical used that makes up the rubber in the sponge and topsheet is important too. It seems that the more natural the rubber the heavier and thicker the topsheet is and as a result the more durable, thicker and harder it is. For some time the ESN style thinner lighter topsheet has been clearly less durable.
table tennis rubber glue
The hardness and thickness of your rubber also changes with the glue that you use. Speed glue made the rubber expand and so did the boosters, all of which are illegal now. The amount of glue you put on your rubber will also make your rubber thicker and feel softer and heavier.
Although I used to preach how much gluing was better when volatile glues were legal, I have converted now. The butterfly water glue I use makes so easy to change my rubbers now. Half the time I don't even reglue, as it is sticky enough to just pull off the blade and put on another blade.
Off topic a little: you can see which English speaking countries, obviously UK but also the Philippines, play the most table tennis (not ping pong).
table tennis rubber cleaner
You do need glue but you can live with out cleaner as I have never bought any in the last 10 years of playing table tennis. Why? Any chemical that you put on the rubber surface can damage the surface. If it is a chemical that doesn't eat at the surface then you won't be cleaning off anything that a bit of water can do. If you really want to get the oil out of the topsheet then soap will do an equally good job. Although I have tried a friend's cleaner before, I just use a little warm water if I really need to clean the surface. Oil actually has some preserving properties that you will notice on the part of the rubber where your finger always sits. It almost always looking like the original. Adding oil to the rubber is a questionable practise and very risky. It can cause a variety of changes, from making the ball slip off, or soften the topsheet so it loses it's elasticity and also make the topsheet expand, possibly making it illegal as it may pass the accepted ittf limits.
The best advice I can give you is keep the price of your playing down so you can buy another rubber.
table tennis rubber change
Instead of looking for the best butterfly rubber cleaner, just change your rubber as it naturally wears down. Changing your rubber is usually every few months for a regular players using rubbers that allow high level of spin. If you don't change enough your stroke will slowly change and you might find that once you get your new ones you are not used to that level of spin. I often do this by mistake when going to an important tournament. Make sure you have given yourself a few days play with the new rubbers, in addition, wearing in the rubber a touch often makes it play better. I find the every sponge feels a little stiff until it has been compressed all over the surface atleast once on every point it contacts.
*This page is a work in progress: I always like to post my thoughts, and progressive planning and research first as a blog article on either tabletennisyoutube.com or here at tenergy05.com before I make my next video - both giving a place to collect my ideas and possibly have others give me some ideas or material to work with in the video. Once the video is made I then post it into the article. I try to cover what is the most searched for (first from google, second from youtube) and tend to then let that become a parent page or first page in a book. If people would like to write an article with one of the following topics as the title please do, otherwise check back as it will take me a while to say everything I want about these things.
One of the next videos I make I want to cover the following:
next: ratings types cleaner sale weight ranking change oil grip test booster protector
let me know if you have any thoughts about these topics in the comments below thanks.
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I have some thoughts about the thickness of sponge
Submitted by pnachtwey on 23 December 2011 - 5:34pm.Now I am a old fuddy duddy no non-sense engineer.
1. Sponges don't have power. They don't generate power unless you burn them to create steam for a steam engine.
2. Sponges absorb kinetic energy of the incoming ball. The thicker the sponge the more energy it can absorb.
3. Sponges return only a fraction of the energy they absorb to the ball. Since a thin sponge and a thick sponge will return the same fraction of energy this also means the thick sponge absorbs more energy that it doesn't return relative to the thin sponge. Therefore the kinetic energy of the ball after impact will be less with a thick sponge than a thin sponge. The speed of the ball after impact will be less with a thick sponge not faster.
This is assuming a flat hit. There is more to consider when brushing and the ball is stretching the top sheet.
I like to do absurdity test. Assume the paddle is not moving. Now if a thick sponge really increased the speed after impact then why not make the sponge even thicker for more speed? I know there are rules against the sponge being too thick but if you doubled the thickness of the sponge would the ball bounce back twice as fast? Would the ball bounce back faster than the speed at which it impacted the rubber. Obviously not or I would be a billionaire with my TT energy generator.
I also like Boz's news paper analogy. Put one sheet of newspaper on a bare blade. The ball would still bounce off the news paper covered blade pretty quickly. Now put 10mm of news paper on a blade or even just two mm. I bet the ball would almost fall of the paddle after impact.
4. A thick sponge will feel softer and play softer than a thin sponge made of the same material. Boz has a nice news paper analogy for that. Try sleeping on one sheet of news paper and then try sleeping on 10mm of news paper. The material is the same but the thcker layer of news Paper will feel and actual is softer.
5. The TT rubber manufacturers don't tell us how softness or hardness of a rubber varies with thickness.
Power in the sponge
Submitted by TT energy on 23 December 2011 - 6:01pm.Thanks pnatchwey - I will reply step at a time here. My brain is the stereotypical male brain can only focus on one at a time.
1. For me power is a bit like energy that you don't need to work as hard for. A loss of energy, would come from lino type sponges but some sponges tend to bounce the ball out with more energy especially when considering that most the time you have the chance to loop out speed than you have the chance to flat hit out speed.
No sponge or rubber - just wood is faster - but speed or power comes from both holding the ball to create spin and catapult it out. Some rubbers give you more control over this than others, yet the classic idea of control is that anything that is easier to user for a beginner less bounce or spin is more control.
For me and probably more advanced players something like tenergy gives more control as you can do the loop shot more consistantly.
Sponges absorb energy and they don't return all of it.
Submitted by pnachtwey on 24 December 2011 - 5:29am."No sponge or rubber - just wood is faster"
Yes!!!! There is no sponge or rubber to absorb energy. The speed after impact will be high. The ball deforms when it hits wood but the ball returns most of the energy to kinetic energy. The same goes for wood. Hard bat players purposely use 'slower' woods that absorb energy so the speed is controllable.
The thicker the sponge the more energy it absorbs. The sponge can only return this energy if it maintains contact with the ball as the ball accelerates during the rebound. If it doesn't then this energy is lost.
When looping or brushing the impact stretches the top sheet and may deform the sponge a bit but most of the energy goes into strecthing the top sheet and not into compressing the sponge. When the top sheet springs back it adds to the tangential speed of the paddle so one gets more spin and speed but because the paddle is not hitting the ball flat a lot of energy and speed is lost because the ball is not hit flat.
If you want speed then flat hit with a thinner sponge. That is why I like my Rakza 7 1.8mm on the FH of by "Ball Whacker" when I am not playing with my T05.
"For me and probably more advanced players something like tenergy gives more control as you can do the loop shot more consistantly."
Yes, but that is because T05 sponge is a little more springy that others. If we simply compare 1mm, 1.5mm, and 2mm sponges of the same type your news paper analogy applies. The thicker the rubber the softer it is. I ball will not bounce off of 100 sheets of news paper on wood very high whereas the ball will bounce off of one sheet on wood.
Also, when you loop you are putting a lot of energy into rotational energy ( spin ) instead of kinetic energy ( speed ). When flat hitting the energy simply goes into kinetic energy ( speed ).
About power.
People generate power not paddles. It is that simple. You can power a bicycle. A paddle cannot. You can move on your own. A paddle cannot.
Paddles can have energy but what ever energy they have was generated by people power unless you burn them. Then you release the energy of the sun stored in the wood and the chemicals that made the rubber.
There is a lot TT mysticism and mythology and very little has been critically analyed.
mystical TT
Submitted by TT energy on 24 December 2011 - 6:50am.Awesome stuff Pnatchwey, this is exactly what I am looking for.
I hope you don't mind I will be copy pasting parts of what you have wrote up into the opening page. Your comments serve as my reference (I'm not stealing your ideas, you can see where they come from below.)
This is exciting!
when brushing and the ball is stretching the topsheet
Submitted by TT energy on 24 December 2011 - 11:46am.Ok Pnatchwey, we agree to a loss when flat hitting.
But when at angle say just blocking, I believe that 05 has the highest ability to make the ball go up. I am avoiding throw angle as you hate it but I don't know how to say it.
If you give me a topspin ball and I angle my bat to get it to go over the net there is nothing that catches the ball sending it back with the most amount of reversed spin and speed that I know of.
Tacky chinese rubber absorb so much energy in both the tack and deadness of sponge, not only that the angle you can contact to counter is much finer. I find it excellent when you have perfect stroke but everything else you are behind the eight ball.
It is very likely to just slip off the surface even though it is tacky
Post it. I encourage it.
Submitted by pnachtwey on 24 December 2011 - 1:08pm.There have been others that have posted links to TT documents but I think they posted the a link to the data without understanding. In no case has a thicker rubber been documented to be faster than a thinner rubber. Tacky topsheets make the rubber even slower.
There is no way anybody can argue with the newspaper analogy.
If hitting the ball at a 45 degree up swing then the forward motion is the sine(45 degress)=0.707 of the paddle speed. The same goes for the vertical motion. Losing 29% is a lot to lose compared to simply flat hitting.