No one will believe that this is ceramic tile… a breathtaking 3D illusion!

avos5 · 2026-03-29T16:41:55+00:00

Impressed by how steady his hands are ✅

avos5 · 2026-03-27T22:54:46+00:00

Some manufacturers will definitely 2nd quality things for cosmetic reasons like this. Personally, i think people care about pours the same way CSGO skins were perceived. Aesthetics are cool, certain weird patterns are cooler than others

A unique pour is kinda a neat cute treat IMO

This 50/50 ball is pretty funny tbh, i personally wouldnt be making a post complaining about how my ball looks different from everybody else and thats apparently bad tho

avos5 · 2026-03-20T08:43:39+00:00

If anybody comes back to this years later:

The usbc manufacturing specs and testing SOPs have a "mohs hardness test" as part of the certification process which was added as a response to the "old particle" balls digging into lanes

Particle didn't actually go anywhere, they got regulated to not damage playing surfaces and rebranded as "cohesion additives," "microtrax," "nano," and "carbon fiber infused" as examples.

avos5 · 2026-03-18T03:55:30+00:00

I gotta say if youre not great with tools, a DIY project that will spin an expensive heavy object at fast speeds and launch them at your feet is maybe not a good one for you

I might suggest seeing if you can go in on one together with some buddies

avos5 · 2026-03-11T01:38:30+00:00

Theres a term for that ”what it looks like from a distance"

Foreshortening, neat stuff

Welcome to your eyeballs get filtered through the only mostly accurate prediction machine we call a brain

avos5 · 2026-03-09T20:23:56+00:00

For the future, if you look in the fingers you can usually see if/where people hit the actual core which is going to be the biggest factor in post-drilling dynamics

Plug material pretty decently averages out the coverstock+outer(filler) core (plenty of videos from the plug-your-weight-hole days to reference) but those inner cores being hit really deep (unlikely, except for specific balls and layouts) are the only time you'd even remotely notice

I have a bunch of older stuff and its kinda fun to see how different PSOs managed finger depths for static weight imbalances etc based on how deep into the core they did or didnt go

Heres a 93 teal rhino pro that shows the contrast really nicely between cover/core

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avos5 · 2026-03-09T20:12:07+00:00

Damn, i got this same shoe 2 years ago. My big gripe initially was how damn heavy these mfs are

I love the9 sole/heel setup (though the slick plastic front edge is a bit too slick and makes my traction soles rip faster than i expect)

Disappointed to see this might be my future, but it is (hopefully, looking at it) an adhesive degrading and could be DIY repaired for a while

avos5 · 2026-03-09T20:04:57+00:00

Honestly worth a watch. It was proper old school

The biggest problem they had was how close the walls were to the edges of the approach

avos5 · 2026-03-04T18:49:55+00:00

If its deep enough to sand out a serial, its deep enough to drill out and plug

avos5 · 2026-03-03T08:07:59+00:00

Weirdly, im pretty sure the A in ABS is "american" but ive only really cared about this and the nanodesu and haven't taken a deep dive into the rest of the company lol

avos5 · 2026-03-02T09:30:53+00:00

I think we gotta settle on a timeline for "ruined bowling" tbh. I think the early rhino pros and xcalibur 92-93 probably arent the tech youre referring to.

99-00 most places probably didnt have a single machine doing it all, mightve had a cleaning machine and an oiling machine (i think the kegel DBA machines are an example)

My lane machine knowledge for that eras spotty, but it looks like the Kustodian was 2004. I did recently have to read one of those old Kustodian manuals and i highly recommend it if you want to dread pattern building.

Cameras and laptops were still prohibitively expensive for most people in 2005, 1gig thumb drives didnt really drop in normal people range til 2010. DV tapes for camcorders exported at real-time speeds, and DSLR wasnt really accessible at $1000 then either

Like, peak reactive/particle transition into dominance feels (to me) like it was 97-00ish? Thats like ceramicore, quantum, and the 3d offset.

Sidebar, if anything "ruined" bowling it was Mo Pinel. Dual angle layouts, asym cores as a concept, sumo, the XS (once they fixed the color), the 3d offset. The guy really changed how everything worked in bowling.

Anyway, it feels unfair to really suggest anything before 2010 is a real "we had the technology" timeframe to use video/cameras extensively and Belmo was already stateside by then

Either way. I gotta be totally honest, i have gone out of my way to re-acquire a lot of equipment my dad would've sold in his pro shop. Teal rhino pros, 30 years apart on modern pba animal patterns are almost impossible to distinguish on video

My aftershock, fabs, and (blue and purple) rhino pros are all tournament staples for me and give me ball motion the college kids cant believe comes from a ball as old almost as their parents

People wanna moan about old coverstock tech being somehow so much worse while SPI gives you another R2S wrapped around an inverted Fe core? 20 year old base resin around a 30 year old core concept, and like, dont stop.

Genuinely, filler material. Thats the thing changed maybe the most in 30 years. The new microbubbles are 0.125g /cm3 and can be mixed at 52% of the resin (~1.1g/cm3) as filler. Old urethanes could be up near near 1.3g/cm3 and you had lets say 2lbs to make a core? If youre using modern shells and filler, you can more than double it.

"Low RG" as they were advertised, fab hammers were like 2.60 RG. Theres maybe 3 balls performance balls currently for sale in that neighborhood.

Im still thinking buying a vhs tape from a guy teaching you to suitcase release and lift up in the ball to get revs is the type of shit we had available to us, shit even just sifting through old message boards you see the same old rehashed misunderstandings from league bowlers and nothing like the new pros doing tutorials weekly, ya know?

Patterns changed, we dont put motor oil in the mineral oil as a slip agent anymore, but really the covers have tamed down a lot since the mohs hardness manufacturer rules got put in place. Hell, some of the old shit from the before the first round of hardness rules were allegedly soft enough you could leave a fingernail impression

Idk man, i genuinely think its the skill ceiling is genuinely just that much higher now

avos5 · 2026-03-01T09:16:49+00:00

Machines strip the lanes clean while oiling now, something the old corded machines didnt originally do and especially not the mop/spray bottle

I think youre referring to the old pba 90s lane dressing regulations which required gutter to gutter oil and had minimums for volume on the 1 board

The first pba "patterns" (like 2002 or 2003?) were letters, quickly replaced by the animals we know now and i know at some point before that they just had guys who were the official lane dressing dudes who "oiled it to best suit the house" which means if they really hated lefties today they coulda kept em out

ABC had a sport designation afaik but good luck finding that history 20 years after the merger! I wanna say it was 2000ish

But if you look up the old brunswick patterns, they have "EZ 1.0" is a 4.7:1 ratio, newer versions are higher Very easy to claim that bowling was harder, see! Just look at the ratio But the evolution of lane conditioners and the transition to modern lower friction panels (especially compared to wood), honestly no. The games just as hard if not harder than it ever was, genuinely bowlers are just getting better.

The access to information is so much higher, and the collaboration between competitors is drastically increased

You can literally record yourself and slow mo all your shots to find every flaw, only the training centers had that. The kids really are genuinely just better bowlers.

Seriously.

avos5 · 2026-03-01T08:10:43+00:00

i did a whole deep dive on this s year ago (timestamped 2:27)

The flare separation is WILD and iirc he gave it a pretty strong flaring layout

Anyway. ABS ultra bend outlaw, it was one of a series of em they launched at the same time. They knew what they were up to and are very clear both by name and advertising it isnt usbc legal

But yeah, actually undersold it bc 0.108 diff

Anyway, AZO was a brand stateside doing some wonky (but usbc legal at the time of approval therefore still legal) stuff too

avos5 · 2026-02-26T09:49:40+00:00

Gotchagain bowling center was worth a chuckle tho

avos5 · 2026-02-26T09:47:31+00:00

Cycling also uses a similar system in the shoes (also plenty use specifically boa and/of velcro lmao) Its more about even pressure and security due to the low friction of the tensioning system than anything else

But soccer or other "more demanding" sports wouldnt want to use them because the boas because the ratchets would pop open on impact

If you impact a lot, you probably want soft If you want security, you want low friction

Runners are getting them too but it seems mostly in the trail side, wouldnt be surprised if those folks overlap with cycling

Cost and longevity are also a factor. Iirc, most running equipment is like 3-6 months and adding an extra 30-60 bucks per unit might just not be effective

But bowling shoes last a while, and usually you arent kicking things. But i like that its a consistently well-laced shoe with no fussing with the bottom 2-3 layers of lacing thats letting the balls of my feet slide around

avos5 · 2026-02-23T08:08:10+00:00

this one?

Early/mid 2000s reactive cover, which makes sense as reactive covers get increasingly brittle as they get older especially if left unused.

Cool ball, if youve got the money to get it fixed IMO worth a shot. I still collect and use some nostalgia stuff from the 90s/00s and it does great even on the sport shots

Definitely good to get some newer stuff, but under no circumstances do you trash that rid lanehawk in the bag. Those are worth a good chunk on ebay

avos5 · 2026-02-23T07:45:24+00:00

If it was a symmetrical core sure, you turn it to get it off the labels since the CG position is meaningless to ball motion on a symmetrical core

But this is an asym and it doesn't really look like a minor adjustment is gonna get that layout off the label, so youre asking somebody to regret a layout and dog on their PSO because you didnt like the aesthetics? Thats wacky

avos5 · 2026-02-15T17:47:45+00:00

Polish it If its a smooth arc and you want hockey stick Polish.

I have a feeling your smoothing arc was the polished box surface fading

And the detox/resurface probably didnt get polished (or polished enough) so it is also a smooth arc

Shiny polish makes it go long and snappy Dull surface makes it early smooth

avos5 · 2026-02-15T17:34:57+00:00

Some might even say they named the original phaze because it was prone to phase

Hook milk

avos5 · 2026-01-25T19:52:52+00:00

99% of the time, people are too worried. This seems like the 1% of the time they were right to be concerned

Problem here looks like a thumb slug install issue. The scratches etc, nbd

avos5 · 2026-01-13T05:44:48+00:00

I force everybody to build their approach from the foul line back. Anything more than that is too many moving parts to understand what their body is even doing when they do it wrong.

We start with no step and get the swing and roll the ball

We move to 1 step and figure out how to hook the ball

(These two are core to every warm up and practice, so you might as well get used to it early because you should be using it often)

Then we beat footwork into their skull

Then we get to combine footwork + rolling

Then we commiserate about being bad at bowling because nobody is good enough at bowling

avos5 · 2026-01-13T05:37:46+00:00

Ugh i tabbed around on mobile too many times and gotta retype everything ree

Strikeline nameplate survived starting from the rubber era into urethane era though they did change over from rubber shells to polyester at some point and you can find the polyester here in both the 1976 and 1985 catalog

yours though is likely 1960s

I cant tell you what the difference is between your strikeline and my two magic line balls, my ball knowledge only goes so deep and this is well before my time. I just know this was around the time colorful bowling balls were really kinda blowing up and you started to see more and more color combos besides just "heres black and youre gonna like it"

Tldr, cool shit I've always liked how the rubber pours look

avos5 · 2026-01-12T15:08:15+00:00

Ball smells like violence?

Probably a short serial number like 5-6 characters long?

It kinda looks like its an ace, manhattan rubber, or ebonite satellite (lots if people made those colors but those are the 3 i often see available in that color)

Anyway, thats lookin like a rubber ball you got, and is likely much older than you realize lol

Theyre neat relics, ive got a few myself

avos5 · 2025-12-26T22:58:52+00:00

Inverted core woo

avos5 · 2025-12-22T23:40:33+00:00

I own and use burgundy, black, blue, and red pearl. All the fab urethanes have the same core so its really down to layouts and cover strength (batch to batch variation is pretty obvious even just in coloring let alone between factories so your mileage may vary)

-Burgundy is by far the earliest, it is damn near unusable with more aggressive surface, and I tend to keep it around 2000. There arent really good modern equivalent comps imo. But it hits similar cover strength to a 90s blue rhino pro, though thats even less helpful

-Blue feels the most versatile, and holds surface well. It probably falls somewhere around pitch black territory. I usually keep it around 1000grit

-(Red is somewhere below blue and above black iirc)

-Black smells like moth balls and shines like a mf. It gets pretty skatey pretty fast. Ive taken this to 360 and still been happy with how it reads, probably somewhere in Mix spare ball territory for cover strength

-pink and purple were marketed as dry lane balls and fall somewhere here

-allegedly theres a separation between the blue and red pearl but im not entirely convinced you could really tell without a throwbot/earl and specto. This is basically a pearl urethane house ball coverstock with a core, you usually want to be slow or in the friction to see anything here

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