The ball: 15 pounds, 3.3 oz top weight prior to drilling, 1.5-inch pin
The drill: Pin under the bridge, CG directly below, no weight hole. Box finish.
Me: PAP 4 over 3/8 up, tweener revs, good speed, high axis rotation and low tilt
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Bought this ball to shoot 10-pins and play the outside when my home bowling center dries out late in a shift (which is at least 3 out of every 4 weeks). I've got some urethane stuff but even they were moving too much.
The Starburst certainly seems willing to help. It comes not just polished, but glassy. This is the slickest ball I've held in years. It even feels a few degrees slicker than White Dots and Target Zones, although that's probably an illusion created by the shock of picking up something with "Lane #1" on the side and it not feel like a reactive ball.
My test bed for this ball was league the last three weeks. For two of those three weeks, all I did was shoot 10s and 6s with this ball. It easily handles that task, even when the lanes are pretty dry.
But I recently got the chance to throw it as a strike ball, and I was astounded at its performance characteristics. This ball revs nicely and gets into an extremely heavy roll. It is super-smooth on the lanes and pretty much ignores the surface. The weight block seems to nicely set up a heavy roll and the ball carries better than any other plastic ball I've ever thrown. Carry rivals any urethane piece in my arsenal and even some entry-level reactive balls.
It begs the question of why other companies don't wrap a decent core inside a plastic shell and sell it. A summary follows:
The good: Goes straight when you want it to, ideal for truly burned-up lanes, core technology gives it an edge over other plastic equipment when used as a strike ball.
The bad: Not much as long as you don't expect it to go sideways.
The verdict: You want plastic, buy this. That way you'll have something more than a 10-pin seeker.
Jess
