Fan Theory 1.5

English correction by Forrest York. Check his website Flowarts.me !

Contents:

• Chapter 1. The Different Grips.
• Chapter 2. Grip Transitions.
• Chapter 3. Fan Construction.
• Chapter 4. Thumb grip.
• Chapter 5. Isolations.
• Chapter 6. Relations.

This post is to talk about some theory that I came up with that will allow spinners to combine almost any fan trick, as well as create a common terminology for which can be used to talked about Tech Fans. While there are certainly many ways that tricks can be done without using my methods, and the convenience of having a common framework for tech fans is lost.

Chapter 1. The Different Grips.
Theoretically I only use four different grips.

Frontal Grip (or 'outside', or 'open' frontal grip)

That is a grip when the fans are situated in front of your face and with hands inside the rings. All of the frontal flowers, some pendulums, TTN, Cosmo, Thomas and other such tricks are done using this grip.

Flower grip (or 'outside, or open' flower grip)

All the flowers, weaves and others are done with this grip.

All of the Flowers, Weaves and other tricks not previously mentioned are done with this grip.

Along with the Flower Grip and Frontal Grip there are two inverted Grips:

Inverted frontal grip (or 'inside', or 'closed' frontal grip)

This is a grip where the fans are situated in front of your chest and with your hands inside the rings with your thumbs pointed up. All of the frontal flowers, some pendulums, TTN, Cosmo, Thomas and other such tricks are done using this grip.

As you can see most fan tricks can be done with one of these grips, and through a combination of these grips you could perform any trick.

Inverted flower grip (or 'inside', or 'closed' flower grip)

Almost always this grip is using for the different kinds of the buzzsaw. I use this grip seldom, but it is prevailing grip in the technique of the most of American spinners. Particularly it is using for the linear isolation and 1.5bt weaves and for the things this kind.

As you can see the most of known fans tricks could be realizing using one of this grips, and actually all of them using combinations of the grips.

Chapter 2. Grip Transitions

You can see that the front grip and flower grip are only different in where your hands are in relation to your body. But way you hold the fans are the same.

To change from the flower grip to the frontal grip you need only to change the position of one of your hands so that both hands are in front of your chest. You can transition several ways, with the probably the best way to do it, without plane breaking or stopping your fans, is a movement I call a "shift". This video below gives a short tutorial on "shifts".

Using shifts you can change from the Flower Grip to the Frontal grip, thus transition from trick to trick with ease.

Remember that the inverted grips are called Inverted because they only differ from their regular form by with side you put your hands into the rings.

In this instance, your hand goes into the ring from the inside for the flower grip and from the outside for the inverted flower grip.
I also call these grips inverted, because of the fact that you can switch forms simply by making a 180 turn (without breaking planes).

So the grips can be separated into two types, the flower and frontal grip. And this is where the shifts are used, to switch between the two grips.
Each grip can then be separated into the two forms, simple and inverted. And for these forms we don't need special movements, a simple turn will change with form you are using.

Using these transitions between the grips you can achieve a new level of freedom in your fan spinning. When you change from one trick to another and don't think about the way to do it, thats flow.

Chapter 3. Fan Construction.

The type of fans I often use are:

Length of the spokes are about 32-45cm
The ring should be about 8-10 cm in diameter depending on your hand. Rings are covered by leather or just polished metal. If you already have fans with small rings (3-6cm), you can try to put 2 or 3 fingers in the rings and spin them that way.
I think that fans shouldn't be too light, because some tricks require the use of the fans momentum.
I also advise you to use gloves if the handles of your fans aren't really perfect.

Chapter 4. Thumb grip

Sometimes, the previous four grips mentioned are not enough and sometimes to switch between regular and inverted grips a turn is impossible or inconvenient.

Consider the grip, where the fan is spinning on the thumb. Such grip could be called the "Thumb grip". Sometimes you may see it in American Fans spinning videos.
Using this grip leads to new possibilities for tricks and transitions.
For instance a transition from Flower grip to Frontal grip doesn't require a shift, just change one of your hands to the thumb grip. So in principle you don't need to use shifts at all and could instead use the thumb grip (if you don't need to turn 360 degrees), but this grip is less reliable and often less convenient.
Moreover, sometimes the thumb grip has to be used to go from the inverted grip back to the simple grip. It makes it much simpler to change between simple and inverted. I show all of these concepts in this Tutorial:

As you can see I change from frontal flowers (frontal grip) to the windmill (inverted frontal grip) using the thumb grip, without any turns (As it was suggested in Ch. 1). I would also think that using this grip leads to new possibilities and tricks.

Chapter 5. Isolations

Basic Fans Isolations could be divided into two groups: Isolations around one of the two wicks/spokes on the edge of the fan or around the center wick/spoke. It is also possible to isolate the fans around the geometric center as well as the handle (which is regular fan spinning).
Moreover Isolations could be divided into isolations in the plane of the fan and isolations in the perpendicular plane of the fan.
Generally all of the tricks with isolations in the plane of the fans are done with the frontal or flower grip. I show all of these concepts in this Tutorial:

Another approach to isolations which was suggested by Corey White, has the isolation in the plane perpendicular to the fan's plane.
The advantage of this isolation is that you can use it to change your grip. See the Corey's tutorial for such isolations:

Chapter 6. Relations

There are several types of the 'relations' in fans:

There is the I-Relation which lacks a picture, but is just the W-Relation but facing away perpendicular to your body, so it looks like a vertical or horizontal line.
And there is also the S'-relation which is the S-relation but mirrored in the vertical plane.

These "relations", from some points of view, can be considered as having different centers of rotation. For instance:

О-Relation

X-Relation

S-Relation

W-Relation

So due to complicated geometric form, in comparison with other tools, the fans have a lot of possible variations for each trick.
With a lot of tricks, especially flowers, having 5-6 variations (using different relations)

Obviously, in reality not every variation is possible, but there are usually still at least 3 possible variations for a trick.

Let's consider 2 petal wall plane flowers (also known as 'star') as an example. It use to looks like this (O-Relation)

О-Relation

But using our knowledge about different fan "relations" we can find other variations for this flower, which are often better than the original:

X-Relation

S-Relation

Don't forget that there are 2 possible variations with the S-relation due to the ability to mirror S into the S'-Relation, and change the flower.
(Unfortunately that simulation was impossible)

I-Relation

The simulation of the "W" variation of this flower couldn't be done because of the limitations of DoubleStaffSimulator, but it can be done in real life.

Until present day, we treated such relations as just an isolation around different wicks. And that is true, but I would like to focus on the fact that if you think of each trick as a variation (X, O, W, I or S), one can discover new tricks with ease.

All these ideas have been covered in this tutorial about geometry:

Thanks to Dreamer for his amazing DoubleStaffEmulator !

p.s. Nowadays, I've changed my views on fan spinning, so this article is a bit out of date. For more modern information please refer to Fan Theory 2.0 (though it has no English version yet)