The trip down to see
@Uzi Sports is becoming a bit of a yearly ritual for me, I normally leave it til the Easter weekend but as they are away this week I went down a bit earlier. I would still have been using my Poseidon from last season but due to some prat bowling with a bat killing ball in nets recently it took some toe damage that will undoubtedly shorten its life span and I didn't want to be left without a backup. And what a backup this will be! In fact i think it will be going straight into the first game if the weathers decent. I let Uzi know i'd be coming in so he kindly pulled a few things out ready for me, i say it every time but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a shop where theres such a high number of high quality bats. I started making my way round the shop making a pile of maybe bats, straight away I had two or three keeleys, a slightly older Newbery, another Poseidon but in the Tendulkar shape. My criteria was basically something very similar to what I had before, slightly shorter blade/slightly longer handle combination with a convex profile. Its something that just seems to work so well for me, you get real bang for your buck and a great trade-off between having a bat thats a bit heavier with more wood but that still picks up well. I really had my eye on a GN as I haven't had one for a few years and the E41 LE I had was just unreal, but the Kronus they had was utterly massive weighing in at 3 lb 2!! Just a bit over my usable weight range. Uzi then pointed me in the direction of the AJK range they have just begun stocking, these are not the standard Salix bats at all, normally i would associate them with very classical profiles which is why despite their high quality and beautiful finishing I hadn't even considered them. I've always found them a bit weedy, a little bit like a golfer using blades. Fantastic if you're good enough to hit the middle most of the time but generally very unforgiving. It seems Andrew Kember has decided that he needs to move with the times so he worked with Uzi to create something that fitted into their range of bats, essentially this is a Salix take on the Poseidon, I haven't done any measuring but it fitted through the bat gauge easily enough, this is not a small bat though. There's no concaving and now fully done up with 1 & 1/2 hybrid grips, knocked and faced with edge tape it still only weighs 2.10. Goes without saying it makes a great sound with the mallet. It was very soft so obviously pressed for performance and to have a good time not a long time. I expect I'll only get two seasons out of it but that doesn't really bother me. Thanks to Uzi for looking after me and pulling this one out of the cupboard, I think he'd originally had this one made for himself so it was probably hard to let it go. I wish I could use a 2.13 bat because there was a beautiful, very grainy Keeley Superior in there I had to tear myself away from. Its crazy money for these bats now but you really get what you pay for.
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Topic: AJK 33 Uzi Profile (Read 10356 times)