December 31, 2009 - 6:54 am
My tennis racquet needs restringing but i haven’t had it done before so im not sure how to get it done. I play competitively for a club and i use a wilson hammer 7. im a baseline player. im not wimbledon though so i don’t want to have the best strings that money can buy. any help?
i mean as in what type of strings should i get have and what tension?
Just take it into your club, and have them string it. For you, and everybody else here who might read this, I would never take a frame to a sporting goods store for stringing. They don’t always have a certified stringer. Sometimes it’s just some teenager who has been shown once how to use it, and has no other work to do…
Anyhow, clubs usually have a default string they use. It’s usually just a standard synthetic gut string. The place I go uses Prince syn. gut with duraflex. It’s a good enough string, and very cheap. Seems to last a decent amount of time. But if this is your first restringing, breaking strings probably isn’t such an issue for you. This way, all you have to do is drop the frame off at the club, tell them the tension you want, and wait a few days. No need to worry much about the strings.
So, what about that tension? Your racquet should have a tension range printed inside the throat of the frame somewhere. For example, if it says 60±5lbs, the range is from 55-65 lbs. Now, I’m going to ask you to think about your current play with this frame. Do you find that you hit the ball deep a lot? If this is the case, string 1-2lbs above the middle tension (in our example, mid tension is the 60lbs). On the other hand, if have difficulty hitting deep, penetrating shots, string 1-2lbs below mid tension. If you’re perfectly happy with how your frame has felt to you so far, then just string it at that middle tension.
And keep an eye out on those indicators. If you string at 60 now, and start to notice that something just isn’t right, use the same guidelines I gave above to determine the tension you’ll use next time you string.