Hype Is Part of Life; We’ll Help You Sort Through It – February 2009 – No Holes Barred

NO HOLES’ WOULD LIKE TO WELCOME two new ball manufacturers into our sport’s business sector vying for your consumer dollar. The first company is Tech-Line products, based in Michigan, which at one time was a major core supplier for Brunswick. Tech-Line’s ball division will be called Motiv bowling. The second company, Via Bowling Products, is based in China. Via has been a major capital equipment manufacturer since its inception in 1995. It will be interesting to see how enthusiastic consumers will be in welcoming these manufacturers into a very competitive ball market. Testing this month revealed some balls which did not live up to the manufacturers’ claims. This does not mean
these balls are “bad,” or that they did not perform well on any specific lane condition. In fact, we really liked what we saw from them in that they showed versatility and usability on many of our test patterns. Lesson learned: Listen to the hype, but make your own decisions. And we’ll do our best to help you sort through the options. In defense of the manufacturers’ marketing departments, it is possible that, due to our limited testing time, exposure to a finite variety of lane conditions and the normal limits of the human testing factor, some users may find credence in a company’s claims; the fact remains that, in some cases, we did not. Our feature ball this month comes from Storm. The Second Dimension features an all new mica-infused pearl reactive cover surrounding Storm’s strongest symmetrical core, called Continuum.

Joe Cerar Jr.

*Posted with permission from Luby Publishing Inc.