I’ve been playing table tennis since I was a sprat, taking on Korean hotshots in the Ohio State University Student Union in Columbus during the ‘50s. I used a hardbat — a slow, club-like Ping-Pong blade clad in spongeless rubber. Now I use an Ohio-made blade. It’s smaller, faster, as nimble as I can make it, special and beautiful and artisanal.
My Harmuth Custom Blade has a cork handle with a purple-heart inlay, smooth, spinny rubber on one side and trickier, pimpled rubber on the other. The blade — the wooden part — was made in North Royalton by George Harmuth, a skilled cabinet maker retired from Leiden Cabinet; and Dave Pech, a photographer who lives in Strongsville and runs the Strongsville Table Tennis Club in the Ehrnfelt Recreation & Senior Center.
There are 11 U.S. Table Tennis Association-sanctioned clubs in Ohio, including ones in Cleveland, Lyndhurst and Shaker Heights. Pech and Harmuth play in Strongsville primarily, and they make the blades in a workshop in Harmuth’s back yard. It’s a peaceful place ideal for concentration and craftsmanship.
It’s great to buy local. It’s particularly great to buy art you can play with.
The core of the Harmuth blades is balsa; the rest of the “head” may be bass or a series of different plywoods. The number of plies and the weight determine the speed. The angled, flared handles, signed by Harmuth, are inlaid with cork or exotic woods such as walnut, purple heart and rosewood.
Pech researches source materials online and is using 40- and 50-year-old veneers he inherited from his great uncle in Germany. He buys maple veneer from a mill in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, cork from Canada and balsa from "a place where I can specify the density of wood I want.” He’s a detail man. Harmuth, meanwhile, makes blade assembly sound easy:
The Harmuth Custom Blades sell for $75 if you buy directly from either man, and $80 on the website, but the price may go up to $100. Store-bought blades are cheaper, and ones ordered from specialty Ping-Pong suppliers can cost from $30 to $200. So the Harmuth blades are a relative bargain, especially considering you can order one to your specifications.
According to Pech, who learned to cut wood from his dad, the veneers and how the plies are glued together comprise the uniqueness of the blades. His own is a five-ply maple-walnut with a balsa core, with maple for the outside plies and two walnut veneers. “If people want close-to-identical blades, they need to order in pairs at the time, because then we can make them out of the same structure of wood,” Pech says. “Otherwise, we can use the same weights, we can use the same materials, but it comes form a different tree.”
“Every blade is different,” Harmuth says. “We can’t duplicate.”
Putting together a blade takes two weeks, from assembly to drying. Each has a production number, so one similar could be produced for a player who encounters one he or she likes. That’s likely as word-of-mouth spreads; so far, Pech and Harmuth have sold 15. They split the revenue.
The blades sing. “Once a blade is finished, it has a resonance,” Pech says. Using a guitar tuner, Pech can quantify the sound. The pitch dictates the blade’s speed. That also depends on how players “combine the blade with the rubber. That’s altogether another science.”
A science Pech and Harmuth are sure to probe.
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