Weight Issues With Replica Players

When I started playing Subbuteo in the late 60’s / early 70’s the only teams you could get your grubby little hands on were either the flats or the 00 scale heavyweights, I played with both at Club level, but my favourite was, and still is the Heavyweight figure of the 70’s with it’s iconic pose, complete with a bar to fit in it’s base. To me at that time they just looked the part, they lived and breathed in a miniature world. So on my return to the game these were the player types I wanted to play with. I looked around the second hand market and found some great examples, and some really mind boggling prices. A team C100 back in the day was about £0.50p which would equate to around £7.00 today. I’m now looking at prices of £25 upwards for anything half decent. Now I’m not a collector, but I wanted heavyweights and didn’t want to pay the often exuberant second hand prices. After looking around I found new products in the style I wanted, from various manufacturers like Santiago, Top Spin, Zuego, and Astrobase to name a few. 

Santiago

I chose Santiago mainly because they looked identical to my beloved heavyweights and they were hand painted to order in all the colours available from my youth, at a price that seems more than fair in this day and age. Saying that though Top spin and all the other replicas look nice as well and are also reasonably priced.

After receiving my first 6 teams from Mark at Santiago, I was very impressed with the quality of the painting. What I wasn’t too impressed by though was the weight of the player, boy they felt light, not what I expected. To be fair Santiago supply their teams unglued so you can rectify this and that feel can be greatly improved by the addition of a little more weight inside the base before making the assembly permanent.
I found the addition of a small ball of Blu Tack pressed into the base sufficed, it increases the weight very slightly and removes that hollow sound when the player strikes the ball, or in my case the post when a player spectacularly misses an open goal from inside the penalty area and headbutts the post instead.
If you wanted to be a little more scientific in your approach you could glue an extra weight into the base to achieve a similar result. The reason I feel that the Santiago replicas feel so light is probably down to the plastics that are used in their construction, Plastics are lighter an tougher nowadays, but with a little application the traditional weight, and feel can be achieved quite easily.
 
My Top Spin acquisitions the Middle three have been disassembled and weighted to my liking the two teams on either end were well glued and have been left as is.
  

Top Spin

I was on the lookout for a few new teams to supplement my limited collection of Santiago's, and Santiago at the time of writing is not painting new teams until this coming September. So I started looking around again. I was very fortunate to be offered some Top Spin teams for free, but I felt free was a little too cheap, and the donor would not accept any form of payment so we decided that I would make a donation to a charitable cause that we both felt worthy, Macmillan Cancer Support.
After the teams arrived my initial impressions were just as favourable as they were with my Santiago acquisitions, and also like their Santiago counterparts they felt light, perhaps not so light as the Santiago’s but definitely lighter than their 70’s ancestors.
As luck would have it 3 of the teams came apart quite easily, they had only been lightly glued but I did manage to break a couple of the discs whilst trying to dismember the Alessandria team. After the first breakage I tried a Santiago disc in a top spin base and it fitted, so I carried on dismembering the Italians breaking another disc in the process.
I then dismembered The River Plate team which literally flew apart, one disc nearly found it’s way into the dog’s mouth as it flew from my grasp, it was only my acrobatics and my screaming of LEAVE that dissuaded our dog from making an attempt to eat it. But she thought I like this game and sat patiently waiting for a reoccurrence. You could see the determination in her eyes if she could talk she would probably have said “Do you feel lucky punk?”.
Dismembering the hooped team was simple they weren't glued. So after the addition of Blu Tack, and ordering a couple of black discs from Santiago I had 3 teams the way I like them.
The remaining 2 teams where literally stuck fast, and I’m not prepared to try and dismember the poor guys in case I ruin the paintwork, as it is in pristine condition, these 2 teams do seem a little heavier but still have that hollow sound when they headbutt the post, probably the same sound if I headbutt a door frame. Now I know what you’re thinking why does this fool headbutt door frames, well I don’t intentionally but it has happened. By the way why is it when things like that happen it’s always in front of an audience who think it’s funny.

Glued Figures

If you have glued figures from the likes of Zuego or 3D your probably not going to be taking them apart in case you manage to ruin the team so I wouldn’t suggest you try unless you know what you are doing, but if you fancy experimenting Santiago or Top Spin heavyweights are not only interchangeable with a little fettling but are conducive to my described method.

A Few Facts and Figures

For the purists amongst us, adding weight to a player might seem a little extreme, so I weighed a couple of Top Spin heavyweight teams, unweighted all 10 players weighed 20g the weighted one weighed a whopping 25g, so if my maths are correct I’ve added approximately 0.5g of Blu Tack to each player.

I did a similar thing to the Santiago heavyweights and an unweighted team was 19g, and a weighted variety again around 25g. Just to make sure I’ve not missed anything I weighed a Subbuteo team from the 70’s that tipped the scales at 23g.

The adding of the weight to the modern heavyweight replicas doesn’t detract from their performance too much either, one can still curl and spin without too much difficulty, chip shots are no harder to perform, but the biggest plus (and this puts the originals to shame at times), is that 95% of the time they remain upright after flicking, as the Blu Tack has made them more stable, that's just simple physics. Now I call that a result.

For The Lightweights Amongst Us

Now I’m not talking about your ability to hold your liqueur in the Après-Subbuteo celebrations, but those of you who use the pegged figures from the 80’s onwards. These type of figure whether they be original or modern day equivalents have a lot more choice when it comes to bases. Just choose the base type you prefer, and your good to go, that's not saying that these bases cannot be weighted for your own preference, because they can. Also the Zuego Profibases can take a heavyweight with a bar instead of a peg if you require. So whatever your poison we have all bases covered to coin a phrase.

Now whether or not one would be allowed to play in a competitive arena with modified bases is dubious at least, Old Subbuteo Rules states that Miniatures cannot be modified to alter the weight, size and contents of the base. But you can polish the base.

FISTF Rules are a little more vague when it comes to weight because they meet the size requirement I have no idea whether they would be allowed. But saying that if it was me I would ask the question and be upfront about it and have alternatives on hand just in case. In solo play of course it doesn’t matter anything goes.

If you fancy having a go try experimenting with different weights so you find the balance and weight that suits you best. 

Keep On Flicking

Ian 

 








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