What is the correct weight for a Snooker ball?
The rules do not say, since it really depends on the composition and manufacturing of the ball; they only define that there is a maximum of 3 gr difference allowed between the lightest ball in the set and the heaviest.
Most people know that Snooker balls are 2 1/16" in diameter. Those people are wrong.
Thee balls used to be 2 1/16" in diameter, but with the advent of the E.U. the rules were rewritten using Metric measurements. This caused minor rounding errors which messed up the table geometry, so they were rewritten again in Imperial, except for the balls.
The balls are 52.5mm with a tolerance of +/- 0.05mm, a little larger that 2 1/16".
As the balls get played on the table, they will lose mass. This is especially true of the cue ball, which is frequently significantly lighter in older sets, which throws off the the players ability to judge positional play accurately. A cheap digital scale is handy for checking this, and replacement balls should be readily available.
Modern balls:
As indoor ball-and-stick games developed into Billiards, Ivory balls were introduced and became the standard, replacing clay and wood as the preferred ball material.
There are four problems with Ivory, however:
1) They are not consistent, having hard and soft spots affecting the collisions and subsequent deflection.
2) They are affected by temperature and humidity, adding to their inconsistency
3) You only got three good balls from a single tusk, and even then one of the balls had the nerve channel of the tusk running through its centre (hence the traditional spot on Billiard balls.
4) The world only has so many Elephants, and killing them for a set of Billiard balls is unethical.
So the word started looking for a substitute for Ivory, and Plastics were invented.
Vitalite Balls:
The Albany Billiard Ball Company is possibly the earliest successful plastics firm and certainly one of the oldest plastics companies in the world. The business was started in 1868 on Albany's South End. The company was renamed, in September, 1977, the Albany-Hyatt Billiard Ball Company. John Wesley Hyatt was one of the company's founders and the American inventor of celluloid. Celluloid, besides being the base of photographic film, was a substitute for ivory, long the prime substance in billiard ball manufacture. The Hyatt "composition" ball, with a celluloid base, dominated the sport until the 1960s.
Crystalate Balls:
Crystalate is an early plastic, a formulation of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol invented in the late 19th century and patented by American inventor George Henry Burt. It is best known as a material for gramophone records produced in the UK by Crystalate Manufacturing Company (although Burt's own US-based Globe Record Company also manufactured Crystalate records), and for moulded billiards, pool and snooker balls, as produced by the Endolithic Company (UK), later the Composition Billiard Ball Company.
Crystalate was based on Bonzoline, a plastic produced by John Wesley Hyatt's US-based Albany Billiard Ball Company. Birt, a former Albany employee, began manufacturing what was essentially Bonzoline in the UK in 1900 as crystalate with Percy Warnford-Davis, under the Endolithic name. While Crystalate as a plastic material is obsolete and no longer manufactured, like Celluloid and Bakelite it is commonly encountered by collectors of vintage and antique goods, because many products were made using the substance. The plastic was even mandated in the UK for making billiard balls by the Billiards Association and Control Council in 1926.
Super Crystalate Balls
Super Crystalate is a brand name for a composition material, a cast rather than moulded resin, first produced by Composition Billiard Ball in 1972 as a replacement for Crystalate.
Aramith Balls:
Saluc S.A. was established in Belgium in 1923 and started making Billiard balls when their traditional chemical industry dried up after World War II. They started making Phenolic Resin balls in the 1960s and quickly proved to be a superior ball. They have dominated the market now for decades, and have four prime sets of balls;
Premier Set: The standard for commercial and club use
Tournament Champion Set: For tournament play. Tighter, more precise tolerances.
Crystalate Set: Identical to the Tournament Champion set except for colour (and price). Made for the traditionalist.
1G set: A new formulation from Saluc, these balls weigh approx. 1g more than the Tournament Champion balls and have a tolerance of 1g across the set of 22 balls
Kicks:
Sometimes, when a player plays and the cue ball strikes the object ball, the momentum seems to die from the cue ball and the object takes off at a much smaller angle of deflection than expected. This is the dreaded Kick.
The cause of Kicks is unproven, but there are a few suspected causes.
The rules do not say, since it really depends on the composition and manufacturing of the ball; they only define that there is a maximum of 3 gr difference allowed between the lightest ball in the set and the heaviest.
Most people know that Snooker balls are 2 1/16" in diameter. Those people are wrong.
Thee balls used to be 2 1/16" in diameter, but with the advent of the E.U. the rules were rewritten using Metric measurements. This caused minor rounding errors which messed up the table geometry, so they were rewritten again in Imperial, except for the balls.
The balls are 52.5mm with a tolerance of +/- 0.05mm, a little larger that 2 1/16".
As the balls get played on the table, they will lose mass. This is especially true of the cue ball, which is frequently significantly lighter in older sets, which throws off the the players ability to judge positional play accurately. A cheap digital scale is handy for checking this, and replacement balls should be readily available.
Modern balls:
As indoor ball-and-stick games developed into Billiards, Ivory balls were introduced and became the standard, replacing clay and wood as the preferred ball material.
There are four problems with Ivory, however:
1) They are not consistent, having hard and soft spots affecting the collisions and subsequent deflection.
2) They are affected by temperature and humidity, adding to their inconsistency
3) You only got three good balls from a single tusk, and even then one of the balls had the nerve channel of the tusk running through its centre (hence the traditional spot on Billiard balls.
4) The world only has so many Elephants, and killing them for a set of Billiard balls is unethical.
So the word started looking for a substitute for Ivory, and Plastics were invented.
Vitalite Balls:
The Albany Billiard Ball Company is possibly the earliest successful plastics firm and certainly one of the oldest plastics companies in the world. The business was started in 1868 on Albany's South End. The company was renamed, in September, 1977, the Albany-Hyatt Billiard Ball Company. John Wesley Hyatt was one of the company's founders and the American inventor of celluloid. Celluloid, besides being the base of photographic film, was a substitute for ivory, long the prime substance in billiard ball manufacture. The Hyatt "composition" ball, with a celluloid base, dominated the sport until the 1960s.
Crystalate Balls:
Crystalate is an early plastic, a formulation of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol invented in the late 19th century and patented by American inventor George Henry Burt. It is best known as a material for gramophone records produced in the UK by Crystalate Manufacturing Company (although Burt's own US-based Globe Record Company also manufactured Crystalate records), and for moulded billiards, pool and snooker balls, as produced by the Endolithic Company (UK), later the Composition Billiard Ball Company.
Crystalate was based on Bonzoline, a plastic produced by John Wesley Hyatt's US-based Albany Billiard Ball Company. Birt, a former Albany employee, began manufacturing what was essentially Bonzoline in the UK in 1900 as crystalate with Percy Warnford-Davis, under the Endolithic name. While Crystalate as a plastic material is obsolete and no longer manufactured, like Celluloid and Bakelite it is commonly encountered by collectors of vintage and antique goods, because many products were made using the substance. The plastic was even mandated in the UK for making billiard balls by the Billiards Association and Control Council in 1926.
Super Crystalate Balls
Super Crystalate is a brand name for a composition material, a cast rather than moulded resin, first produced by Composition Billiard Ball in 1972 as a replacement for Crystalate.
Aramith Balls:
Saluc S.A. was established in Belgium in 1923 and started making Billiard balls when their traditional chemical industry dried up after World War II. They started making Phenolic Resin balls in the 1960s and quickly proved to be a superior ball. They have dominated the market now for decades, and have four prime sets of balls;
Premier Set: The standard for commercial and club use
Tournament Champion Set: For tournament play. Tighter, more precise tolerances.
Crystalate Set: Identical to the Tournament Champion set except for colour (and price). Made for the traditionalist.
1G set: A new formulation from Saluc, these balls weigh approx. 1g more than the Tournament Champion balls and have a tolerance of 1g across the set of 22 balls
Kicks:
Sometimes, when a player plays and the cue ball strikes the object ball, the momentum seems to die from the cue ball and the object takes off at a much smaller angle of deflection than expected. This is the dreaded Kick.
The cause of Kicks is unproven, but there are a few suspected causes.
- Chalk - Chalk transfers from the cue tip to the cue ball during normal play. If chalk on the cue ball gets between the cue ball and the object ball at the moment of impact, then the collision will not be true. Almost certainly chalk-caused kicks do occur.
- Static - As the new composition ball roll across modern baize, theory claims that a static charge will build up on the ball. When this ball collides with another, the static discharges and causes the kick
- Too clean - Snooker players, especially at the professional level, are fastidious about keeping the balls clean, and frequently ask the referee to clean dirty balls. The balls are manufactured to extremely high tolerances, so that when they collide, there is a high co-efficient of friction between them. (You can use this effect to 'throw' plants off line.) Theory claims that when a rolling cue ball collides with a static object ball, this 'throw' causes the kick. Interestingly, Billiards players do not use cotton gloves, and regularly handle the balls so that there is a small coating of oil from their skin always on the ball surface, and they do not seem to suffer kicks.
- Bouncing - High-speed photography has highlighted the fact that cue balls rarely roll on the surface of the table .. they bounce. If the cue ball is in the air when it collides with an object ball, then of course the collision will not be as expected.
More on Kicks by Shawn Murphy:
What's to be done about the Kick? November 22, 2013, 6:57 pm
Hi everyone,
Just recently I said on Twitter that I was going to go off and have a serious look into the subject that is 'the Kick'. It has - and still is having in my opinion - a major impact on our game.
My first port of call was to a good friend and respected university lecturer Robert Ledger and his efforts have been second to none in addressing this problem.
From the outset it's important that we make a clear distinction between 'the Kick' and a bad contact.
Firstly they're not the same thing. A bad contact is something that has been in the game in one form or another since it started. A slightly heavy or dull contact usually slows the cue ball down a touch but does not generally effect the pot.
These are caused by a number of factors, including chalk, dust, fibres from the cloth and also human error. A bad strike can definitely cause a bad contact a bit like a bad putter can make the ball bounce along the green in golf.
A Kick, where the balls literally bounce off the playing surface and, on a slow motion camera, can be seen trying to climb one another and, in some cases, cause the object ball to miss its target, is a chemical reaction and can be fixed. But to understand the fix we must know the cause.
A Kick in its most basic form is caused by increased friction between the two balls in contact. This is something we've heard several times before, but the reason for this has never been discovered...until now, I believe.
This increase in friction is caused by a chemical reaction taking place involving four elements - the cloth and the oil in it, the phenolic resin covering of the ball and the table heaters. Essentially if we could maintain the balls' outer coating of phenolic resin throughout a match we would never see a Kick. It's the breakdown of this outer coating during play that causes the increase of friction.
This breakdown is caused by the oil used in the cropping or finishing process on the cloth before it leaves the factory and when heated by the table heaters and other elements in an arena setting actually erodes the surface of the ball,
exposing a less smooth surface underneath.
When this exposed part of the ball strikes another, we get a Kick. If, during a longer match, two eroded sections collide we get a massive Kick.
So how do we solve it? One suggestion of how to fix the problem would be at source and try to get the cloth manufacturer to use a different oil in it's cropping process.
A different way would be to turn off the table heaters at tournaments as it's this heat from underneath which causes the oil in the cloth to transfer onto the surface of the ball and erode it. This is why you very rarely see a Kick in a snooker club. None of the tables have heaters so the process is slowed right down. It does still happen but only once in a blue moon. If you look back at snooker in the 80s and early 90s before the introduction of table heaters, Kicks were almost unheard of.
Of course these two solutions do involve some big changes and understandably will take some time to filter through but in the meantime there is a third solution.
It turns out that the ball manufacturer produces a cleaning product a bit like a car wax. Clean them first removing all impurities and then apply this cleaning product. By the time you've applied it to them all it will have started to dry and is then ready to be buffed to a high polish restoring the ball to a 'showroom' or 'factory' finish. This will ensure Kick-free snooker until of course the oil in the cloth eats its way through and exposes the underneath surface of the ball. If and when you get a Kick you know that it's time to re-apply.
At tournaments this, of course, means that there would need to be 'new balls' ready to be swapped in at the first sign of a Kick, a bit like how they change the balls in tennis every seven games. After seven games of hard hitting professional tennis they now know that the balls will have degraded to a less than perfect condition. So if they can do it, why can't we?
All the best,
Shaun
What's to be done about the Kick? November 22, 2013, 6:57 pm
Hi everyone,
Just recently I said on Twitter that I was going to go off and have a serious look into the subject that is 'the Kick'. It has - and still is having in my opinion - a major impact on our game.
My first port of call was to a good friend and respected university lecturer Robert Ledger and his efforts have been second to none in addressing this problem.
From the outset it's important that we make a clear distinction between 'the Kick' and a bad contact.
Firstly they're not the same thing. A bad contact is something that has been in the game in one form or another since it started. A slightly heavy or dull contact usually slows the cue ball down a touch but does not generally effect the pot.
These are caused by a number of factors, including chalk, dust, fibres from the cloth and also human error. A bad strike can definitely cause a bad contact a bit like a bad putter can make the ball bounce along the green in golf.
A Kick, where the balls literally bounce off the playing surface and, on a slow motion camera, can be seen trying to climb one another and, in some cases, cause the object ball to miss its target, is a chemical reaction and can be fixed. But to understand the fix we must know the cause.
A Kick in its most basic form is caused by increased friction between the two balls in contact. This is something we've heard several times before, but the reason for this has never been discovered...until now, I believe.
This increase in friction is caused by a chemical reaction taking place involving four elements - the cloth and the oil in it, the phenolic resin covering of the ball and the table heaters. Essentially if we could maintain the balls' outer coating of phenolic resin throughout a match we would never see a Kick. It's the breakdown of this outer coating during play that causes the increase of friction.
This breakdown is caused by the oil used in the cropping or finishing process on the cloth before it leaves the factory and when heated by the table heaters and other elements in an arena setting actually erodes the surface of the ball,
exposing a less smooth surface underneath.
When this exposed part of the ball strikes another, we get a Kick. If, during a longer match, two eroded sections collide we get a massive Kick.
So how do we solve it? One suggestion of how to fix the problem would be at source and try to get the cloth manufacturer to use a different oil in it's cropping process.
A different way would be to turn off the table heaters at tournaments as it's this heat from underneath which causes the oil in the cloth to transfer onto the surface of the ball and erode it. This is why you very rarely see a Kick in a snooker club. None of the tables have heaters so the process is slowed right down. It does still happen but only once in a blue moon. If you look back at snooker in the 80s and early 90s before the introduction of table heaters, Kicks were almost unheard of.
Of course these two solutions do involve some big changes and understandably will take some time to filter through but in the meantime there is a third solution.
It turns out that the ball manufacturer produces a cleaning product a bit like a car wax. Clean them first removing all impurities and then apply this cleaning product. By the time you've applied it to them all it will have started to dry and is then ready to be buffed to a high polish restoring the ball to a 'showroom' or 'factory' finish. This will ensure Kick-free snooker until of course the oil in the cloth eats its way through and exposes the underneath surface of the ball. If and when you get a Kick you know that it's time to re-apply.
At tournaments this, of course, means that there would need to be 'new balls' ready to be swapped in at the first sign of a Kick, a bit like how they change the balls in tennis every seven games. After seven games of hard hitting professional tennis they now know that the balls will have degraded to a less than perfect condition. So if they can do it, why can't we?
All the best,
Shaun