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I tried a friend's Stringmeter on a spare Volkl C-10 the other day and was shocked to find that it read 40 lbs. How could that be, since I'd had it strung somewhere in the 50s a few months ago and had not used it more than a few times since? When I plucked its Head RIP Control strings ("the closest you can come to natural gut"), they gave off a ping that sounded to me like at least 50 lbs., and the racquet was not trampolining balls all over the place.
So I Googled the question and learned almost nothing about tension loss at dozen tennis sites, including one that is devoted to strings and stringing.
At a British site, I read that the Stringmeter measures "relative loss of tension over time," but relative to what? My stringer told me it's relative to what a racquet was strung at, but I'd like to know more than that about it. He also claimed that a string job will soon lose 10% (how soon for what strings?), and might go down a total of 15% or more (how soon for what strings?). I wanted 52 lbs., so he strung the C-10 at 58. I will use a Stringmeter on it tomorrow, if I catch up with a friend who has one. The stringer's expensive state of the art machine will not measure tension after a string job has been finished, he said.
At the British site, I also found a little information about Racquet Technic's ERT 300 tester, which electronically measures "dynamic tension," rather than tension measured in kilograms or pounds. I will have to look into dynamic tension, find out what it means.
Have any of you tried the Stringmeter or ERT 300? Are they helpful? Accurate? How else can one predict or determine tension loss? I could not find an evaluation of the tension retention properties of individual strings. Has anyone come across a chart? Probably not -- there are hundreds of strings out there, but maybe someone has compared the best, or most popular, of them.
Is this worth looking into? Not for pro's and serious lower level tournament competitors, of course -- they go through strings fast -- but there are plenty of good and not so good recreational players who want to get as much mileage as they can from their strings. They must adapt to seemingly imperceptible lower tensions that produce more power and less control as months go by, but not realize it.
So, should they have their racquets strung at, say, 10% higher than they want, then put them aside for a week, or use them just for practice to break them in? That's what my stringer recommended, and I think he's right. But if I had not asked about it, I am sure he would have strung at what I wanted, not what I wanted it to wind up at.
So I Googled the question and learned almost nothing about tension loss at dozen tennis sites, including one that is devoted to strings and stringing.
At a British site, I read that the Stringmeter measures "relative loss of tension over time," but relative to what? My stringer told me it's relative to what a racquet was strung at, but I'd like to know more than that about it. He also claimed that a string job will soon lose 10% (how soon for what strings?), and might go down a total of 15% or more (how soon for what strings?). I wanted 52 lbs., so he strung the C-10 at 58. I will use a Stringmeter on it tomorrow, if I catch up with a friend who has one. The stringer's expensive state of the art machine will not measure tension after a string job has been finished, he said.
At the British site, I also found a little information about Racquet Technic's ERT 300 tester, which electronically measures "dynamic tension," rather than tension measured in kilograms or pounds. I will have to look into dynamic tension, find out what it means.
Have any of you tried the Stringmeter or ERT 300? Are they helpful? Accurate? How else can one predict or determine tension loss? I could not find an evaluation of the tension retention properties of individual strings. Has anyone come across a chart? Probably not -- there are hundreds of strings out there, but maybe someone has compared the best, or most popular, of them.
Is this worth looking into? Not for pro's and serious lower level tournament competitors, of course -- they go through strings fast -- but there are plenty of good and not so good recreational players who want to get as much mileage as they can from their strings. They must adapt to seemingly imperceptible lower tensions that produce more power and less control as months go by, but not realize it.
So, should they have their racquets strung at, say, 10% higher than they want, then put them aside for a week, or use them just for practice to break them in? That's what my stringer recommended, and I think he's right. But if I had not asked about it, I am sure he would have strung at what I wanted, not what I wanted it to wind up at.
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