Recently I have seen a lot of preference to "perfectly balanced" kendamas. I can understand how this would be helpful for juggles. But for anything else, why? what is the theory behind it? To me, if they weigh differently, that is simply another piece of important information that my hand is relaying to my brain as I hone-in on the muscle memory of a trick.
Some people like heavier or lighter damas. For some it's practice. Others it's because they can't land certain tricks or its to hard.
I have a set up that is severely unmatched and hand rolls can be somewhat unpredictable given the heavier tama. That's the biggest difference for me.
I've noticed that spacewalks, moons and handrolls can behave quite differently when the variance between the tama weight and ken weight increases. So, as far as muscle memory is concerned, i take a little bit of time to re-adjust when that happens. We're just too used to almost matching variances.
Thanks for posting that, it's a great piece and pretty much covers it all. (side note: One thing though does anyone else have a formatting problem on that Sweets page? The picture doesn't show for me and the post is one long paragraph.)
googles cache goes as far back as april 14th so I cant get the image for ya, but the image appears to have been removed from their wordpress. Formatting likely an issue in wordpress as well, CSS styling perhaps?
Totally agree, space walks are somewhat harder when you have an unbalanced set up. For example, heavier tama and light ken means the tama whips the ken around in the air. Like if you go for a lightning drop, the tama will seem to whip around faster than the ken. When it's balanced, the two are always opposite as they circle through the air, and it makes tricks like spacewalk swaps easier. While playing with an unbalanced set up is definitely doable, I think a lot would prefer weight matched, myself included.
It's fun to experiment with weights but like the Sweets article says, it's also in the mind. For stuff like handrolls I do notice the diffrence with just a few grams though. I'm only eight months into kendama so my collection is still pretty small to compare a lot but my overall best balanced dama at the moment is a RWB complete that I recently bought from their new website. I didn't put any notes about the weight when ordering so that's really cool I think.
My main thing is juggles. You really want an even weight on both tama and ken so you don't have to change your throw every time you have to juggle. It's kind of like juggling a lacrosse ball and a tennis ball, it's just awkward.
A lot of it is in the mind for sure. We should set up a blind test where there were 3 Kendama setups (2 unbalanced and 1 balanced) and you could play with each one but then at the end had to say which one was the weight matched one. I bet most people would get it wrong. I can't tell you how many times I get a new Dama and don't weigh it for a week or so and it feels totally balanced to me. Then I go weigh it and it's like 70/90 haha
Worst setup I ever received was 15g off. After, a three way swap I now have 3 setups at 0.35, 0.95, 3.05 gram difference. Best setup out the box is an Ozora 1.65g and Koto2.0 1.7 gram difference.
Hey guys! Just thought I would post this question open to discussion: what do you guys think the difference is between weights and certani types of tricks? Are certain weights better than others for certain tricks? What are your thoughts?
You want the ken and tama to be close in weight because when you do string and aerial tricks, you want the center of mass to be as close to the midpoint as possible. That way, one piece won't have a larger rotation path during space walks and one piece won't rotate slower than the other during stuff like butterfly and swirl. Also, when you do juggles, it just feels weird when one is much heavier than the other. I personally don't notice these things unless the ken and tama are more than 15 grams apart though (only one of my setups is like that luckily). As far as total weight of the setup goes, that's up to personal preference.
Imo I love juggles when the tama is heavier. Most of my setups are tama heavy as a matter of fact but it's all mostly preference! There is some truth about center of mass but nothing too crazy to worry about unless they are way off. My preferred weights are 72ish ken with 80g tamas. But i have others that are lower for other tricks and heavier for other ones. I like to have a range of options in terms of weights but for some reason light setups (anything under 69) is awkward as Ive gotten my preference down!
@Matteo Schulz We had a similar thread running so yours has been merged so everyone may see the previous replies. Be sure to check out the Sweets article mentioned above for lots of good info.