what type of woods should you use to make a ping pong paddle?
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You should not use hard wood or wood that splinters as you will have a very hard time to cut it and sand it. For your first ping pong paddle start down at the hardware and find something like pine a 1 ply to 5 ply and see how much you can cut the shape and then stick on a simple bit more to fill out the handle. Making a real professional blade you will need to buy more expensive veneers probably in a hobby shop. Then you may as well just buy a blade from a table tennis shop because it will be faster cheaper and better finished.
Comments
It should be easy to make a 'one' ply paddle out of Hinoki.
I think Hinoki is the wood I see most often. Hinoki is a type of cypress.
One can plane a 'single ply' piece of wood to the desired thickness.
I doubt anyone can make a multiple ply blade without a veneer lathe to peel the blocks of wood into thin sheets.
veneer lathe
Hey that is the first time I have heard these words. I had a serious session of my ej life trying to make blades but couldn't find the terms to search for. I will look into it soon. I wouldn't recommend hinoki as from what I thought, it is an expensive material compared to pine which grows everywhere in plantations at least here in Australia.
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Pine warps too easily
It is a softwood with coarse grains. I don't think you can peel it thin enough.
That Radiatta pine you have down there grows quickly and the rings are too far apart as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_radiata
In the early 80s I use to install and program veneer lathe optimizers. I did the computer prorgramming for 3 in Japan.
In Japan they take their time peeling logs and pay more attention to quality than quantity.
They could peel off veneer sheets as thin as 0.55mm back then and I know they can peel even thinner now.
http://www.deltamotion.com/peter/Videos/charger%204.mp4
http://www.deltamotion.com/peter/Videos/Peeling%20Logs.AVI
I will embed the video later if I can.
The density of radiata pine varies a lot due to moisture. When I was in Tumbarumba, NSW, AU I was working at a saw mill and had plenty of practice at hauling pine around. Some dry boards seem to weight half as much as denser wet boards.
You would need to get a dryer too and make sure the wood is dried.
What you don't see in the video is that the sheets of plywood are then dried in huge dryers.
All in all I think pine is a bad idea. Pay the extra money and get yourself a good piece of hinoki. Hand pick it to make sure the grains are even and the wood is free of any defects.
wet wood
I have had a couple of blades have the top veneer warp one was donic hinoki and the other the joola Kool. Then various like T11 and ttmaster blade just come off the composite underlay. All these blades were balsa cores which seems to point to the fact that moisture builds up inside or the strength of the glue is in adequate to things like carbon which are not as porous as wood for glue.
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