So I picked up my Paradigm last night, long awaited.. The girl on the desk at the bowling centre wanted to charge us £4.25 a game (almost $8) so we declined. I threw it this morning back in my house, which is wood with 10ft Guardian, quite dry but cheap - £3 for 10 games, if you know the right people ;-)

Anyway as the layout hopefully shows, this ball has the pin above my bridge, which for me is 5" from my axis. Pin is 3.75" above my grip centreline. RAD+ is 1.5" right of the thumb with no X hole. Box surface, 1500 + factory polish.

Outside 10 was a no-go. The lanes were dressed for the junior league and the ball checked up at about 20 feet and turned left.

From the inside track, this ball looked good but way too strong. For me, a lot of speed (19mph) and laying off with my hand (about 300rpm) I could use this ball laying it down around 20-25, crossing 15-20 at the arrows and out to 5 at 35 feet. From here it rolled very strong in the midlane compared to the Original X factor and XXX and kicked for home. It wasn't as sharp a move as I had thought given what I have heard so far, but the surface friction in this house cuts 2 degrees off the entry angle due to axis rotation lost in the front part of the lane.

From deep this ball wasn't quite the monster I had hoped. Again please take this in context, it is hard to get anything to recover from deep at this centre unless its a polished rock. Ball reaction is not good if you swing from deep. Don't read too much into this part of the review.

The ball responded well to major release changes (exaggerated spin or straight up the back) but the strong asymmetry in the core covered up minor release mistakes reasonably well. Carry was clearly affected by release mistakes, but this ball matched up very badly to the conditions today, as I suspected it would in this house.

Compared to the Original X-Factor (same drilling) that I also threw today, this ball got into a roll about 3 feet sooner and made its move far stronger. Its hard to quantify number of boards due to roll out.

Tomorrow I am playing a tournament on AMF HPL (overlayed onto wood). I will no doubt throw the Paradigm in practice, so if nothing else I will have 1 or 2 shots to mention.

Although there is not much 'meat' in this review I will keep you all posted on how the ball performs in the next few weeks. Early signs are positive.

Pics for those interested. I'm just getting to grips with the new camera. Resolution on these are terrible. Will get nicer ones soon but I'm a bit busy today.

PARADIGM Logo - http://www.we-todd-did-racing.com/wetoddimage.wtdr/wMTA5ODE2NDZzNDEzZGZkMzF5NTQx.jpg

Layout - http://www.we-todd-did-racing.com/wetoddimage.wtdr/wMTA5ODE2MzZzNDEzZGZkMzF5NTQx.jpg

Nice Scene :-P  http://www.we-todd-did-racing.com/wetoddimage.wtdr/wMTA5ODE2NTZzNDEzZGZkMzF5NTQx.jpg

Not only is the resolution on the camera lousy... but the lighting blows too.
--------------------
American beer is like making love in a canoe. It's f*cking close to water. - Monty Python

If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs. - David Daye

PS the resolution on my camera is 8 megapixel. Unfortunately I didn't want to wait for 15 meg of pictures to upload to WDTR. Nor did I think people would want to wait to download what are effectively boring pictures of bowling balls from there. Jeez..

Thanks Scottie,

I never threw the Eraser but from what I saw of it I would say the Eraser is a more even reacting ball. A Paradigm you would expect to be considerably stronger, especially in the back part of the lane. Also it would be far more angular.

The way this ball transitions from skid to hook shows there is a really strong core inside, it doesn't mess about.