Ultimate Disc Anatomy

The crucial piece of sports equipment for the game of Ultimate is, simply, an engineering marvel. Let's review the individual parts that make up a disc's structure.

Lip or Rim: The outside wall of the disc.

Flight Plate: The flat surface on the top of the disc. The disc design (hot stamp) is placed on the flight plate.

Lines of Headrick: The flight rings named after Ed Headrick, the perfecter of the flying disc. Adding these raised ridges helped stablize disc flight. When Wham-O's patent for the flight rings expired, Discraft added them to the Ultra-Star and became the go-to Ultimate disc.

Line of Shelton: The mold line that runs around the lip of the disc. Named after Jay Shelton, a professor of physics and one of the first people to study the flight characteristics of a disc. Not to mention, a world distance record holder, plus a champion disc golfer & an individual Frisbee world champion.

Navel: The center of the disc.There is usually a small, subtle spot leftover from the manufacturing process.

Script Band: Acts like a big flight ring with an imprint of the disc name and model.

Slope of Morrison: Named after Fred Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee. This is the bent slope from the flight plate to the lip/rim. It was a major improvement from pie tins and popcorn lids and kept the disc from turning on its side on every throw.

[SOURCES: Frisbee: A Practitioner's Manual and Definitive Treatise (1975) & Parts of a Disc (Ozark Ultimate).]

The parts of the disc. [via Craig Stephen SOURCE]