A couple of years ago I had a blade made for me by San Diego area blade maker Borko (http://borkoandson.com/).  We had a very pleasant exchange of emails and phone calls where he asked me a lot of questions about my style and level which I did my best to answer honestly although that was painful at times.  Being a dedicated EJ of course I went ahead and bought a blade from him, which was custom made to the specifications from the conversations we had.  At the time I was using FL handles and sent him a Stiga clipper with a legend FL handle that he could copy.  Now the legend flared is a pretty thick handle which at the time I really liked (I've since switched to straight handles) but the blade he made for me had one of the smallest FL handles I've ever seen.  It felt like holding a pencil.  Not only that but at barely 4mm  it was the thinnest blade I've ever laid eyes on.  For various reasons I decided not to question him about it and promptly filed the blade away in a drawer.

Now that I'm in full blown EJ mode I decided on a whim to pull out the Borko blade and give it a try.  I took the two sheets of vega (pro 2.0, Europe max) off the strad and used them since the heads were almost exactly the same size.  In addition the Borko weighs in at 83g, just two grams shy of the strad so the setup weight was almost the same.  The handle is as thin and strange as I remember when I first got it: FL but very narrow at the top and shorter than a normal handle overall.  My normal grip is fairly far up on the handle, near the rubber, and there was no way I could use that with this blade.  Instead I had to hold the blade maybe 1/2 to 1cm further down so that my thumb was just covering the beveled upper part of the handle.  Bouncing a ball on the blade gave a distressingly low tone and low rebound.  I'm talking defensive blade low.  I was not optimistic.

Several hours later I left the club in a state of serious confusion: this is definitely the strangest blade I have ever used.  The handle of course was problematic, not so much on the forehand but on the backhand where I couldn't quite make the adjustment to find that stroke.  However that issue is trivial compared to the performance of the blade itself.  Was it slow?  Definitely not!  When I swung hard I could rip forehand loops like nobody's business.  And these were fast power loops with a vicious dip and arc on them.  Faster and spinnier than either the amadeus or magellen could generate with the same rubber.  Probably similar in speed to the strad/vega setup although the strad is a much harder and stiffer blade.

On the other hand I wouldn't call call it a fast blade either as it was not bouncy or touchy at all in the short game.  I could control pushes better than with almost any other blade I can think of.  So that covers the two extremes but what about all those intermediate speed and spin shots that are the meat and potatoes of so many rallies?  That's where things got confusing.  The response of the blade seemed to depend a lot on the incoming ball.  For example blocking loops was a touchy business as one loop would be blocked back totally under control with just the speed and spin you would expect but the next would slower and much spinnier (the block that is) while the one after that would be faster and flatter.  Was it the incoming loop changing or was I changing the angle of the blade or contacting the ball on a different part of the blade?  It was hard to tell.  The results were very sensitive to exactly how much speed and spin were on the incoming ball and how you struck it. 

Similarly looping hard against topspin was simply a dream sequence of deadly, high precision, line seeking missiles.  But I couldn't find the handle on those intermediate to low speed opening type loops.  Sometimes I got a solid feeling and a lot of spin but other times the blade just felt uncertain about what it wanted to do, especially on bh loops where I couldn't generate the speed and spin I could so easily on the fh side.  The bh loops were just, well, ordinary. Weak even.  Perhaps this is due to the handle and the adjustment in grip I had to make but the difference between the sides was so marked that I had to remind myself that I was using both rubbers on both sides (flipping between pro and europe to see if I could tell the difference).

Overall the only thing I can say at this point is that it has a lot of personality.  In fact it would be more accurate to say it's suffering from a multiple personality disorder of some type.  I will for sure use it again as the memory of those monster loops and soft little pushes just clearing the net are calling me back to the table even now.  The handle can be dealt with by wrapping it in tape if need be.  The main thing is figuring out what it's going to do from one shot to the next.