Speed glue

Speed glue works by its solvent vapours which make the porous cells of soft rubber expand.

This stretches the rubber giving it a tension that in turn makes the ball behave like an object meeting a trampoline.

It was discovered by accident in the 1970s when a player used bicycle puncture repair glue to fix his racket before a match.

Table tennis player Dragutin Šurbek of Yugoslavia is given the major credit for popularising this use of speed glue between 1979 and 1983.

The theory behind speed glue is that it is soaked up by the sponge layer between the rubber topsheet and blade of a table tennis paddle.

The nature of speed glue is very unpredictable, so several coats are needed to make the bounce of the paddle more predictable.

They have also started the practice of random testing of paddles in international tournaments checking for the aforementioned solvents.

Softer sponged rubber, e.g. Yasaka's MarkV 30, Butterfly's Bryce FX, Joola's Samba, will absorb the glue more readily and therefore have a bigger dome when they expand, leading to a greater effect, with harder sponges e.g. most Chinese rubbers, Butterfly's Bryce Hard, expanding less leading to a slightly lesser effect.

In 2004, the ITTF decided to ban any glues containing volatile organic solvents as of 1 September 2007 due to health concerns.

On 27 June 2007, the International Table Tennis Federation banned all speed glue containing "volatile compounds" effective immediately in response to an unconfirmed health incident in Japan.