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Flight porosity and effect on performance

6/2/2019

3 Comments

 
Flight porosity - how readily air passes through the flight or skirt of a shuttlecock, is all important. Feathers act as an almost complete baffle. They do this with help of a few 100 million years of evolution culminating in a rigid stiff but flexible structure which weighs almost nothing and can self repair. However they not meant to be hit at 250kph with a carbon fibre racket. Nylon shuttles are made with a lattice in order to be moulded and give a resilient product. This makes a perforated flight which gives less air resistance than a feather flight.  This has a number of affects on the feel and performance compared with feathers but most significantly it makes standard nylon shuttles less controllable around the net. In a net shot a shuttle is pushed backwards and the level of resistance to the air determines the speed of turn over or 'righting' and  the height of the bounce off the racket. Standard nylon shuttles therefore 'ping' higher and are more difficult to keep tight to the net. This is why feather users say that nylon shuttles are not controllable and nylon users say that feathers feel 'heavy' - in affect,  in backwards mode, they are as they trap more air.
The unique two part construction of the Bird2 design facilitates a much denser lattice pattern which forms a much more feather-like baffle so that the height off the racket in net shots is similar to that of feathers. The Bird3 design, due to reach the market in a few months, carries this feature on further and matches a feather performance.
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3 Comments
Dominique
10/8/2019 05:48:25 pm

I'm so glad people are working on a good alternative shuttlecock. A lot of clubs here play with nylon shuttles designed half a decade ago and really I think we can probably do better. I'm excited for the bird3 release, thank you for your efforts. I have two questions if you dont mind:
Any more refinement on the release date now that we're half a year futher?

How much does the bird2 / bird3 shuttlecock weigh?

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gordon willis
28/9/2020 06:24:05 am

Hello Dominic,
Sorry for the late reply only just had this brought to my attention.
Bird2 medium speed are 5.17g +/- 0.03
Bird3 medium speed are 5.0g +/- 0.02 This is in line with a 77 grain feather shuttle where 1 grain = 0.0648g

NB recent designs of one piece nylon shuttles claim to be different but are actually worse in some respects than models designed 30 years ago. In fact they are all very slight variations on Bill Carlton's first nylon shuttle developed in the 1940s - nearly 80 years ago.

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Dominique
29/9/2020 10:31:50 pm

Hey Gordon,

Thank you for the eventual reply. I'm not playing right now due to the circumstances, but when I get back into it I'd like to try bird 3. I've had good experience with hybrid shuttles so far and your design looked really promising. Unfortunately I don't remember why I wanted to know the weight. I think I wanted to know because nylon shuttles tend to be hard on the shoulders.

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    Gordon Willis

    Hi, I'm the designer of the revolutionary Bird2 shuttlecock.  Let's change Badminton for the better, together; all comments and feedback are essential to perfecting our products.

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