National Bowling Academy Editors

When Should I Use Surface on My Bowling Ball

National Bowling Academy Editors
Duration:   6  mins

Description

When Should I Use Surface on My Bowling Ball

In this free video, Ronald Hickland Jr., CEO of Creating The Difference, demonstrates each grit of TruCut CtDSanding Pads and how they respond on the lanes.

Watch How to Adjust a Bowling Ball’s Surface if you are unfamiliar or need a refresher before continuing.

TruCut CtD Sanding Pads

Sanding pads are a required accessory to be competitive in bowling. They come in different grits ranging from 500 grit–5000 grit.

500 Grit will take the most surface off a bowling ball, creating an earlier hook on the lane with less backend reaction.

5000 Grit will take the least amount of surface off a bowling ball. It will make the ball hook downlane later, allowing for a bigger backend reaction.

Where to start

If you are bowling a house shot for league, start with the 2000 grit. It’s a good place to start.

If you notice the bowling ball is hooking too much, move up to 3000 grit and so on until you find your desired ball reaction.

If you notice the bowling ball isn’t hooking enough, move down to 1500 grit and so on until you find your desired ball reaction.

The image below illustrates the differences between the extremes in the bowling ball surface.

Check out the breakpoint location downlane and side-to-side location of each bowling ball.

The polished bowling ball hits the arrows at the 09 board and rolls to the 04 board (breakpoint) 40 feet downlane.

The 500 grit bowling ball (same bowling ball used for both shots) hit the arrows at the 09 board, and the breakpoint is the 08 board five feet shorter, 35 feet downlane.

Clearly, this is not where we want to be for our strike shot. For demonstration purposes, we used these shots to illustrate how each product works on the lane.

It’s up to you to experiment with each of the grits and get yourself lined up. The goal is to get your ball to hit the pocket consistently while achieving the three phases of ball motion.

Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.

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CEO, Ronald Hickland from Creating The Difference, I wanna talk to you about when to use surface on a bowling ball. One of the first things you're gonna wanna do whether you're a league bowler, a tournament bowler whether you bowl at a house shot or a sport shot is get yourself a pack of TruCut Sanding Pads. This is gonna give you all that you're gonna need to be able to get your bowling ball at the right surface. Next, you're wanna get yourself a bottle of TruCut Hand Applied Polished Powered by Turtle Wax that's gonna be what you're gonna need to get your bowling ball Polished. That's great but when do you use this? Well let me explain a little bit about how the Sanding Pads work first. They come in six different grits and the lower number means the more earlier hooked you're going to get. 500 is the lowest followed by 1000, 1500 and 2000. And they all look very similar to this. They have a weave in them and they have different amounts of grip on them to give you that grit that it says on the pad. Next, you have a 3000 grip pad and a P5000D. These pads are obviously different in appearance than this pad. The 3000 pads will give you even longer more ball motion, the 5000 grip pad or P5000D, if you use it by hand, it's gonna give you a 4,000 grit finish. If you use it on a ball spitter it'll give you a 5000 grit finish. Last but not least, if you need to be able to get that ball shiny, you're gonna wanna use the TruCut Hand Applied Polished Powered by Turtle Wax. It's gonna leave a 5500 grit finish on your bowling ball when you do it by hand. Now that's great, I kind of know how the products work, when do I use them? If you're bowling at a typical house shot and you don't know where to start, start more toward the middle, that 2000 grit number. If you're bowling and that ball is slipping too much you can always go higher to 3000, 5000 or 5500 Polish or if it's slipping out of nothing either about to pickup more, you can go to 1500, 1000 or 500 grit. That gives you a real good base. So you wanna have one ball like that for sure. The other option especially when you don't know what you're gonna get into is you'll want to get a bowling ball that's polished so that you have that as an option just in case the lanes are hooking a lot or you need to get your ball down the lane. You could always adjust this bowling ball by going back to the shoe cut, Sanding Pads and moving your way down toward that 500 grit pad number if needed. So now what I wanna do is I wanna be able to let you see the performance of the Sanded balls versus the polished balls. The 500 grits versus the 2000 grits versus the 4000 grit and the 5000 grit. So I want you to take a quick minute watch this video to watch the reaction coz here's what's going to happen, those lower grit numbers, the ball is gonna hook earlier and as we begin to go to the higher grit numbers, the ball is gonna get longer down the lane to give us a little bit more back end type of performance. As always, if you have more questions or need more information, make sure you check us out at Ctdbowling.com Ronald Hickland CEO from Create The Difference, have a great day.
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