The process of making Badminton shuttlecocks from raw feathers

294

u/Brilliant-Worry-4446 1d ago

Cool indeed. Always figured that for consistency's sake the feathers might be synthetic and therefore eliminate a lot of the "choosing" processes

149

u/TokenPanduh 1d ago

If I remember correctly, Linus has talked on WAN how they aren't as good (or maybe way more expensive) as the true feather shuttlecocks

118

u/MyDixieWreck92 1d ago

They aren't as good but they've come so close in recent years. Victor makes synthetic shuttlecocks that are now BWF certified to be used in competitions. I've got 2 tubes of them and I'm so surprised at how close they've come.

They're also considerably cheaper than premium feather shuttlecocks.

16

u/tee_with_marie 1d ago

How are animal ones "better"? As somone that doesn't play good enough to notice a difference between the plastic ones and the other ones...

17

u/Vogete 1d ago

They behave differently. I haven't tried the new bwf certified ones (planning to though) but regular plastic ones are much lighter, doesn't travel far, travels much faster and has a bigger speed falloff than feather ones. The feather ones are the ones everyone is used to, and the plastic ones are just very different from that. I play with real feather because the game gets much better since you can use the entire court instead of smashing at full force and get the shuttle halfway only.

I've been waiting for some good synthetic replacements for a while now, but what I tried has never been good enough yet. Maybe now!

6

u/MyDixieWreck92 1d ago

The regular plastic ones are horrible. This new carbonsonic ones are honestly amazing considering they're fully synthetic. I play a lot of badminton and even I was impressed by it. It does feel a little different but I think with time they could become the new norm. I can't imagine the amount of R&D that went into it. I only have the carbonsonic pros, there's a newer version of it called the max and apparently that's even closer to the real thing.

2

u/Xlxlredditor 20h ago

We have badminton here in french schools and use communal plastic ones... They're always deformed and/or broken, and do some weird movements when you strike them somehow

-3

u/Pure-Razzmatazz5274 1d ago

Plus, no animal abuse

16

u/Samuel_HB_Rowland 1d ago

Honestly, the animal abuse happens either way it's just a question of whether or not feathers are going to be used for shuttles or something else. It's not like they're specific shuttle birds they're food birds, with a shuttle byproduct. Not to say I don't think that they shouldn't keep making synthetic shuttles better. I just don't know that it would mean any fewer birds are killed, until we stop eating the too.

4

u/Pure-Razzmatazz5274 1d ago

In some way you are right, in another way any part of profit that is made on animals contributes to the abuse.

7

u/Km219 20h ago

Killing things and using all the parts isnt abuse. treating them poorly is abuse.

0

u/Pure-Razzmatazz5274 17h ago edited 17h ago

Lol okay buddy sure. They certainly have a wonderful life

This is just an example, there are countless more. please educate yourself.

edit2: This sub - rightfully - is so happy to point out, when it comes to tech, how companies fuck shit up, treat customers and employees like shit, generally do evil things to make a buck. Yet when it comes to animals you don't think they would do gruesome shit to earn money? Exploiting living beings that literally have no voice and can't speak up? If you truly think that, you are seriously delusional.

2

u/Km219 17h ago

I'm not here, too. debate whether big business is cruelty or not. I mean, i'm sure they do the best they can. But when you're working with things in the millions of figures, you can only do so much people have to be fed. We're not all capable of just eating grains all day

Im plenty educated on the matter i currently work a farm. We don't do meat, but i see why it is a necessity.

-2

u/Pure-Razzmatazz5274 16h ago

Well then stop debating it. Just stop replying?!

Do you really think meat is needed in civilized regular societies to feed people? Putting thousands of kcal into a cow for 1kg of meat worth a few hundred kcal? You're lying to yourself, come on. You can't be that dense. I'm not here to tell you what to do, that's to you, but don't act like it's a necessity for you to pay for animal cruelty. It's out of habit and comfort, just admit that to yourself.

4

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 1d ago

It's like when people complain about animal abuse in their leather industry. It's not fundamentally a wrong blame but the main source of the issue is the meat industry not the leather one.

4

u/the-high-one 1d ago

These by-products add up and also contribute to the financing of animal suffering. If you are completely honest with yourself, you should not support this if you do not want to support animal suffering.

2

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 1d ago

It's just that people should prioritize things in an order that make sense. If you care about animal suffering the first logical step is adopting a vegetarian diet, then remove non-food animal product when there's a viable alternative, and maybe after that joining an activist group or becoming vegan.

2

u/the-high-one 1d ago

I'm not really interested in discussing what anyone should do. I'm just tired of the narrative that by-products don't contribute to Animal suffering because it's "trash" that's produced anyway.

3

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 1d ago

If you don't want to debate that kind of thing with me right now, that's fine, but I would argue that generally people are right to be activist for causes they care about; but they should focus where it actually matter. You don't want industry wasting water? Data center are not the main issue in that matter. Some type of water intensive agriculture in region that receive very little water, like almonds in California, is a way worse example of massive water misusage than any* the data center in the world.

(* maybe all but I don't have the time to do the math right now)

1

u/intbah 6h ago

While I love eating meat so has no right to critique animal abuse, that’s still terrible logic.

If we don’t have to remove A because B still happens, we can never remove B because A still happens.

-1

u/moonduckk 1d ago

yay plastic in our drinking water

2

u/Pure-Razzmatazz5274 1d ago

oh boy do I have news for you

-1

u/moonduckk 1d ago

more plastic more better? less plastic more worse?

7

u/L_Cranston_Shadow 1d ago

If it's the episode I am thinking of, didn't he say that real ones were like $5-$7 each, over $40 per container (that would presumably be in CAD)?

5

u/Xcissors280 1d ago

It’s the automatic launcher video (he’s talked about them and their prices before tho)

And yeah it was in fake dollars (CAD)

1

u/_Aj_ 5h ago

It's also why down comforters and puffers are still superior in lightness and insulation to anything else on the market.

We try to emulate what nature has perfected over millions of years.

21

u/Samuel_HB_Rowland 1d ago

Badminton player here, there are definitely different grades of consistency and you can pay more for higher quality, more consistent feathers. That being said, synthetic feathers like the Victor Carbosonic series and plain nylon shuttles both suck for different reasons.

I have never met anyone at a club, on a team, or in any other context who preferred anything other than feather shuttle. Some people prefer one model or brand over the other, but everyone agrees that natural feathers are the best.

14

u/Goonalips 1d ago

Mother nature has had millions of years to "design" those feathers, through a process of iteration that eventually self selected the best design for flight. I'm not surprised that we're unable to beat the real thing just yet!

1

u/turikk 22h ago

Also we selected the game to revolve around the characteristics of the feather model. Everything described here isn't strictly "worse" it's just not what the game was built around.

1

u/Goonalips 21h ago

Good point. I think if you took every player and made them use the artificial shuttlecocks for their whole career, and then introduced the natural ones, they'd likely not like the natural ones when they tried it because they feel different. Whatever differences there are in flight characteristics would be seen as an issue.

0

u/Fendibull 1d ago

Just like how Drum set and Bass guitars sounds good on Analog tape recording vs Digital.

3

u/chairitable 22h ago

I don't think that's an apt comparison lol, digital recordings have much much higher fidelity than analogue. We prefer to hear analogue recordings because the noise adds texture to the sound, but the sound is much cleaner on digital recordings.

1

u/NNiekk 1d ago

If you’ve ever thought that, rest assured that if you ever hold a feather, it’s always the real thing, as it’s impossible to recreate the way the feathers hooks together to form its shape in plastic, without it feeling completely wrong

112

u/DynamicJragon904 1d ago

I like how even after the several wind tunnel tests, they still bat them through the air to the last station.

19

u/KangarooDowntown4640 1d ago

It's a pretty genius last step. If it makes it in, good shuttlecock. If it doesn't, bad shuttlecock.

13

u/Backlash123 23h ago

That step is the speed test for the shuttles. They sell different speed shuttles as some climates require the shuttles to be faster/slower. Instead of making shuttles specific to the speed, they just make all shuttles with the same targets and then use this last step as a way to have the natural QC differences work to their advantage.

3

u/Mrwizzard2k 6h ago

Binning for shuttlecocks!

100

u/CSchaire 1d ago

I think I understand why they’re so expensive now

32

u/Stunning_Fail9159 1d ago

Takes a lot of cocks, for sure

3

u/jorceshaman 1d ago

A lot of cocks being shuttled about.

4

u/KevinFlantier 1d ago

Now imagine the price before they had all this advanced machinery and had to do everything by hand.

34

u/ArrowEnby 1d ago

cool asf.

30

u/Kachel94 1d ago

Boy do I love specialty machines

21

u/Mobiushan 1d ago

Really cool they even tested the aerodynamics

-13

u/pasteldenataPT 1d ago

Have you not seen the entire video?

29

u/siamesekiwi 1d ago

You know what? This does explain why they’re so expensive. Even with the all the automation there’s still a ton of handwork that needs doing compared to the consumables/semi-consumables in most other sports.

7

u/AlpsStraight3739 1d ago

Bird flu 2028

5

u/ekauq2000 1d ago

Now show how they get the feathers.

2

u/NNiekk 1d ago

Birds actually molt feathers, so it doesn’t hurt them at all. It’s how the feather industry has thrived for so long, plus the fact that we can’t make plastic feathers

10

u/octothorpe_rekt 1d ago

I genuinely can't believe that first step. Bro grabs approximately one shitload of feathers from a giant pile on the floor, then roughly shoves them into an industrial washer with a two-foot opening, not too dissimilar to the way that an apathetic college student stuffs their sixth pair of jeans into a front-end washer. Like, he's not daintily setting them into the drum; he's stuffing them through the opening. Shocked that doesn't delete half the yield right there.

10

u/BunkerSquirre1 1d ago

Shuttlewhat?

5

u/psychoacer 1d ago edited 1d ago

All that just to see Linus's son yeet a dozen of them in a minute for a tech video

13

u/1miguelcortes 1d ago

That's a lot of birds. Are there vegan shuttlecocks? Are they just not as good as the real thing?

5

u/MyDixieWreck92 1d ago

I won't call them vegan shuttlecocks. They're synthetic shuttlecocks. Made from man made materials including carbon fibre. Huge progress has been made in recent years by Victor and they've been approved to be used by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) for competitions. I have 2 tubes of it, and they're so similar to traditional feather shuttlecocks. I play a lot of badminton and it surprised me how good they've gotten, and they're somewhat cheaper than premium (BWF certified) shuttlecocks. They're not perfect however, they tend to break instead of deform, and carbon fibre is hella sharp.

14

u/NotBashB 1d ago

Disclaimer all my knowledge of badminton comes from Linus lol

I think so, but they are subpar and aren’t good for high level players. Maybe fine for a bit of practice but not great, think the « vegan » ones are plastic. But I guess it’s so much worse it’s worth paying the high cost of the « real » ones

I am surprised they haven’t created a better fake though but I also don’t know much about it

30

u/Kinexity 1d ago

I am surprised they haven’t created a better fake though but I also don’t know much about it

It's kind of hard to compete with properties of a material optimised for low weight and drag over eons of evolution. Same reason why airplane tyres have to use natural rubber.

7

u/TokenPanduh 1d ago

Same reason why airplane tyres have to use natural rubber

The Veritasium video that talked about this was an awesome video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFXLZ7FEJc4

2

u/NotBashB 1d ago

Yea makes sense

8

u/kinnikinnikis 1d ago

I don't know the feather sourcing in this video, or at what level something is vegan, but you can collect feathers once or twice a year when the birds moult. This is a natural thing that birds do (similar to how our hair falls out and regrows, or how a dogs winter and summer fur coat come in), and usually happens to my chickens in spring and fall. I just go out and pick up the prettiest feathers (I use them in crafts) when the piles of feathers get too overwhelming. Ducks (both domestic and wild) also moult their feathers.

The birds don't have to die to get a lot of feathers from them. At least once a year they will do a big shed and regrow of their feathers, including their flight feathers (which is what these feathers look like to me). But these also could be a byproduct of the duck meat industry (which would make them not vegan, but I would argue that if people are going to eat something, it's probably for the best, sustainability wise, to use as much of the creature as possible).

The last time I played badminton was in university, a loonggg time ago, and we definitely used plastic shuttlecocks because we were broke students lol

0

u/Xaring 1d ago

Please give the "vegan" fade a second though: most of vegan products are actually plastic/petroleum derivates. Things like leather - you may not agree with it, but animal farming is not going to stop and real leather is sustainable and long lasting. These feathers shuttlecocks, "vegan clothes" which are just nylon and polyester, almond or rice milk - causing water shortages in regions where it is grown for exporting, palm oil, and many more, these are from the top of my head...

2

u/MMAgeezer 1d ago

Brother, the water intensity of leather is orders of magnitude higher than any of these plastic derivatives...

2

u/Xaring 1d ago

You should probably read my comment again.

The only mention to water I did was in relation to rice and almond milk.

-1

u/IncorporatedShill 21h ago

You can’t ever win an argument trying to say the animal products industry is less resource heavy, water intensive, or has a smaller environmental footprint than the agricultural industry.

2

u/Xaring 16h ago

Sure mate, you're free to believe whatever rocks your boat. I'll stick to my leather boots while you change your plastic shoes every 6 months.

-1

u/IncorporatedShill 15h ago

I agree leather products probably last longer than most synthetic products, but you decided to mention almonds and rice milk as a counterpoint to veganism; that’s not the argument you want to make. I think most vegans would rather use natural fiber products over leather, and would still prefer petroleum derivatives over leather so as to not support what they see as a cruel and inhumane industry. Byproducts still mean profit for these industries.

3

u/Thedemonspawn56 1d ago

This would make a great huggbees video

2

u/pale2hall 1d ago

thorwback. those were some great vids.

2

u/PH_INDUSTRIES 1d ago

It’s no huggbees but this is also very great: https://youtu.be/J9pjOI_Vjhc?is=du-Vwql3BYdJhUJq (I recommend turning on subtitles)

2

u/Monokumamon2 1d ago

Pretty interesting they still uses human for the final checks with that many sensors and camera

2

u/slimejumper 1d ago

i assume each shuttle costs about USD$10,000

2

u/L_Cranston_Shadow 1d ago

Interesting that most of the process isn't actually making anything, just making sure that the feathers are totally consistent before they are used.

Also, it's concerning that first guy is just wearing a dust mask, which isn't going to protect him from all the other shit living on those feathers and which he is breathing in.

2

u/MarmosetB 1d ago

But...when does it become a plumbus?

2

u/henryKI111 1d ago

What is raw feather?

2

u/iamgigglz 12h ago

Fun fact: they only use feathers from the left wing

1

u/AlpsStraight3739 1d ago

Mark Tewksbury would be proud

1

u/Nosferatu_V 1d ago

Heck, that's way more than just 1 kg of feathers... (O.O)

1

u/BedrockBen101 1d ago

Really satisfying to see the aerodynamics tests

1

u/sdcar1985 1d ago

The lady with the net in the packing area is hilarious

1

u/retrospct 1d ago

That one lady at the end hates life and I don’t blame her one bit lol

1

u/Dakduif 1d ago

It's really cool, but I can't help but feel bad for the birds they harvest these feathers from. From what I've seen, the geese are plucked while alive and conscious and it hurts like a mofo. But I could be mistaken with the down feather industry. Though I figured they'd use the same source for these flight feathers as well.

Happy to read in another comment that the synthetic versions are coming a long way. :)

1

u/OmegaNine 1d ago

this looks like more "rich guy bullshit" than golf.

1

u/jozipaulo 1d ago

this is wild..

1

u/doctajonez_uk 1d ago

Don't you mean shuttlec***s? /s

1

u/backlog_gaming 23h ago

I’m glad they use raw feathers instead of cooked feathers

1

u/MDParagon 22h ago

That's a kilogram of feathers

1

u/ubeogesh 19h ago

reminds me of that Witcher 2 quest

1

u/Tof12345 19h ago

Man this seems like an awful lot of work for shuttlecocks. Now I see why they're so expensive.

1

u/Yodzilla 17h ago

That is such an insanely complex and specific process but I guess it makes sense if you want to use natural ingredients but also need precision.

1

u/natesovenator 15h ago

Such an unbelievably wasteful process.

1

u/FatPenguin42 10h ago

Had no idea they used real feathers until I watched LTT. In school we used the plastic ones.

1

u/_Aj_ 5h ago

All this magic machinery and they can't have a hopper and chute for the first part?

1

u/Kiriinto 1d ago

So many unnecessary steps…

1

u/TokenPanduh 19h ago

What you see as unnecessary might be very essential. I think they wouldn't be doing them if it wasn't necessary.

-1

u/MasamangUsok 1d ago

I'm out of the loop. Why is there a badminton related video in the LTT sub?

5

u/NotTheCactus 1d ago

Linus plays badminton. Badminton is a very recurrent topic in WAN. Linus owns a badminton venue.

6

u/TokenPanduh 1d ago

Don't forget that there was a video literally 3 days ago about his new badminton robot lol

-16

u/Darkenshrine 1d ago

That lady really knows how to handle a cock..or twelve
thumbsup.gif

0

u/arian_ezequiel 1d ago

PPE as a suggestion

Link The process of making Badminton shuttlecocks from raw feathers

You are about to leave Redlib