What produces a solid feeling to a blade?

Balsa makes blades hollow. In many cases carbon has the same effect. Sound rubbers make them hollow, Yinhe makes them hollow, etc. Not exploiting these and similar factors makes the blades solid.

Yes, you are correct on all counts, everyone has their own preferences hence you'll see some preferring along with blade composition...''weight".

loop+loop wrote: Secondly, it's the weight. The heavier a set up is, the more solid it will feel.

Timo boll spirit has no vibration and is not hollow at all.

This is a difficult question.  To keep things simple, the mode of vibration - which is composed of a natural frequency with a corresponding mode shape -  of a blade looks to be the x factor here.  Any blade can have an infinite number of modes, and the first and second modes are of particular interest here as the frequencies of which usually fall within the vibrotactile range(~1000Hz) of the human hand.  Most if not all properties listed by the OP plus headsize, damping and so on interact with each other in a complex way to define the modes.

Speaking from past experience, stiffer, thicker and/or heavier blades tend to feel more solid.  For example, many people have reflected that Stiga blades on the lighter side usually feel hollow and vibrate more.  Personally I have tried an Ebenholz VII weighing in the upper 90s that felt very solid and a Rosewood VII in the low to mid 90s that although not as stiff as the former still vibrated way less than an Offensive NCT in the low 90s.  There are exceptions to that, however.  People have reported the first few batches of the Rosewood XO are very light(most come in the low 80s), yet still feel solid during play.  For synthetic blades from Butterfly, the Arylate fiber seems to provide much higher damping than other fibers.  Anyone who has owned one knows well enough, those blades don't vibrate much even when hit off-center really hard and any residue vibrations induced die out very quickly.

Edited by zeio - 11/06/2012 at 1:41pm

this is very useful