Welcome back. I wanted to revisit surface adjustments and demonstrate how having a few pads in your posession can have a major impact on your game. I will continue to remind people that surface has 70% of the ball reaction. 30% is left to the core dymanics. If you understand a little physics, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that within a normal range of layout, the impact will be within 5%. I’m here to tell you, stop worrying about layout. You can easily change way more than 5% with surface changes. In fact, you can make extremely fine to coarse adjustments with surface manipulation alone, i.e., you can go as much as 50% and as little as 2-5% let’s say.

Hang around and pay close attention. Don’t skim over this. There are a few interesting nuggets that will really educate you on surface manipulation. There’s so much more but this literally and figuratively scratches the surface.

Let’s get into the video portion. We are on our normal fresh house shot that we know now plays a little slicker. Not much of a defined track yet since it’s a pretty new installation. Here are some baseline shots with the Storm The Road with basically a factory surface lane shined. It was mildly scuffed and thrown maybe 6-8 games. I experiment to find the line and there it is 11 to 6. Here’s Tyler and he quickly finds it 16 to 5. Now we have are baseline, what you basically get with the ball out of box. We then move onto 5000D TruCut pad by hand. Theoretically the delta if any should be minimal. First with Tyler and you can see it has made a difference. He made a 2 and 1 move, putting the ball around 18 to 6. This was a surprisingly effective adjustment. Now I give it a go and I find an identical reaction going 11 to 6. So far we are starting to see some separation of mild surface between our rev rates. We both have a pretty high track and around 60 degrees axis rotation.

We move on to 3000 trucut by hand. Now you can see that I can still play it the same line but boy did it overdrive. No deflection through the pins, telling you it’s reading earlier now. I move 2 boards with my feet and you see that the reaction is just about there. So still pretty close but certainly impactful to cause a move. By the way, this could be a similar delta to having a 3 vs 5″ pin. Next is Tyler with 3000 grit. Can you guess what he sees? He still has a shot on the original spot but now it’s also driving hard. He makes another 2 and 1, putting him pretty close to the 4th arrow now. The angle is pretty open.

Next we move to 2000 and it starts to get interesting. There is a clear change in ball motion now for Tyler. It’s now become noticeably earlier and a bigger move is required to get it downlane to the breakpoint. He has to make another 2 and 1 move but now, the ball requires so much angle through the fronts but with the surface, it no longer has the energy to make it back to the pocket effectively. He tries to move the breakpoint in to catch more oil and it strikes but barely. One more move and he finds it but it’s finicky now. For me, I didn’t have to generate more angle. It just got a little smoother overall. So I may have gained a bit of traction but lost some angle so it wasn’t hugely different but kind of meh.

Now we move onto 1500. For me, there is an instant noticeable difference in traction. The ball went from occasional meh to definitive traction. I didn’t lose back end motion. The earlier motion meant a definitive move. This surface made the ball much more round and usable for me. From the left side, combating the lack of any track at all is important. For Tyler, he quickly found that is was pretty much same as the 2000. Difference here is he’s righty and pretty deep in the oil. But we’re starting to see separation now in terms of benefit of surface.

It becomes more obvious when go to 1000 grit. Now Tyler has turned to essentially being unhappy with the motion. It’s so aggressive so he has to try harder to get it down lane or go deeper. Both yeild the same issue, loss of angle and while he carried, it’s not really a great consistent look. It’s just way too much surface now. My look on the other hand with 1000 was gorgeous. Really comfortable. Ball had traction but wasn’t lazy down lane. Excellent drive. A little deeper but looked great.

Next was 500 and again, it looked spectacular. Just a little more diggy but clearly for me, ball reaction improved substantially with some deep surface. For Tyler, 500 is now just beyond the point of no return. He can get to the pocket no problem but left a 10 pin 3 of 4 times.

Last few nuggets here if you stuck around.
For the righty and higher rev, the sweet spot for him was around 3000grit. For the lefty, it was around 1000. I just want you to think about that on a curve.

Additionally, after about 6 balls from my side with 500-1000 grit, the shot was done. The Road became really lazy just depleted energy. So there’s no question that you have to consider what happens when you use surface. You have to make adjustments to less surface as the game progresses.

Another really great nugget we wanted to share was what happened when we had the Road at 500 and then hit it with 2000 on top. That looked very different from a ball we started with shine and took down to 2000. Working up from a lower grit yielded a much smoother overall reaction. So now Tyler was able to move quite a bit back to the right and have an overall rounder but more reliable look to the pocket. He no longer had to cover lots of boards but can take advantage of the traction 2000 grit had to offer.

Now look how different 2000 can be depending on how you arrive there. And I’m not particularly worried about laser scanning the ball as this simulates what you would do at the lanes by hand. With that said, this is exactly why I started with the idea that you don’t need to worry about layouts. With various surface methodologies, you can easily manipulate ball motion and this is no better example.

Thanks for watching, I hope you stayed around to really learn what’s possible. We are glad to be able to continue putting out educational material for the bowling community. Please support us by subscribing, sending us superthanks, sharing the video, or joining patreon.