How To Maintain Your Bowling Ball

Scott Pohl here with OnTrack pro shop currently a high school and collegiate coach. And I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about bowling ball maintenance really important to keep that bowling ball fine tuned. So you can have really good performance out of it. First of all, we're going to talk about are the finger inserts and your bowling ball. Important to have those grips checked every once in a while. What happens as you can see, the grips will wear away on side to side, and also on this front edge here it starts to wear away and start to feel like it has a little bit of a lip inside. What that's created from a lot of the time is oil on the lane and also dirt that gets in there. And it just wears away from the grip. Also, a lot of use causes that. If you don't get them replaced, typically you're not going to have that good clean release, and consistency on the lanes. Moving forward on maintenance, a lot of great bowling ball cleaners out there. There's cleaners designed typically for bowling balls that are dull and also bowling balls that are shiny. Some of them overlap as well. Let's first look at one that works well for ones that you want to keep a little bit of surface on and have a dollar finish. So very easy, it's a gel. What we want to do is just pop it open take some of the cleaner out, put it about a dime to a quarter size on the ball. Take a real simple, thin towel or a napkin, and just simply rub on the side of the bowling ball. Now what's going to happen, it's going to absorb into the ball and also your towel will collect a lot of the dirt, as it goes on. The main idea is here though. It gets it really tacky, like it was back to new. Okay. This one is excellent for balls that have a little bit of surface, I'd say 2000 grit or less. Now, the next one here, it was a spray pipe type of cleaner. We're going to spray this on, take our rag through the same process. This is going to leave it with a little more of a shinier process, better for ones maybe for a dryer type lane condition, or if you want to get the ball a little bit further down the lane before it starts to hook. But yet again, has a really tacky feel versus sort of a slippery side that we haven't cleaned yet. Okay. Very affordable products. See your pro shop for those. So from there, we also have a lot of items here that can use for surface cleaning. This is really good. If you want to fine tune how the ball's hooking, I'd recommend using these. After we do the cleaners, when that surface is nice and fresh. So for instance, I'm going to take a 2000 pad and show you what that one looks like. Okay? In a circular motion we're going to do is just wipe it on here with the gray side. Take your towel after that, nice, fresh look to it. Okay. Vice versa, we're going to go with a lot finer grit. We're going to use the 4,000. This is going to also clean it, but you can see the difference that it just doesn't get it as dull a matte finish, still very effective for a certain lane condition, but just not as abrasive. Okay? So now also pro shops offer great oil extraction services. There's a few that I really like to recommend. Number one is the detox service. There's also the wave and also the ovens work really well. I think somewhere between 50 to 75 games is a good idea to get your bowling ball in there have that checked out. Also, if you feel like your ball is losing its performance before that number of games go in and see your pro shop operator they're great services to have, have a good time.