How did YOU get started????!!!

Discussion in 'Badminton Stringing Techniques & Tools' started by kakinami, Oct 1, 2020.

  1. DuckFeet

    DuckFeet Regular Member

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    Loving that arty shot of the machine above!
    So I started because I'm a serial tweaker, my stringer was a 35 mile round trip away (over a gallon of fuel), and a couple of other reasons I think. I don't break strings that often - I made a .66 last a year! So I got a "test the water" Pro's pro challenger which I was assured had been calibrated. It obliterated the first racquet I tried at 24lb. Maybe because of bad side arm placement, but mainly becuase it was pulling 4lb over and there's no way that frame was handling 28lb.

    I put up with that machines for a year or two then sold it to a fellow member and upgraded to a better base with a Wise, also from a fellow member. Its a tyger profi 52. Not bad but I do want a superstringer deluxe, damn you @s_mair. I've got a version 12 wise, chudeks and the diamond coated fixed clamps.

    I think I do maybe 150 racquets a year for club mates (done around 600 total), word of mouth only. Have experimented with patterns and settled on 2 piece poroportional square/+2 because it gets the hardest feel at lowest tension and increases sweetspot a little. Currently stringing for everyone at my small club and a few stragglers as well as work from local county coach after one of my business cards found its way to him.

    Mostly stringing 26-28LB BG80 and BG80P a couple of times a week. Its a hobby with a little pocket money but I'm always tempted to try and get a few more customers as I still enjoy doing it.

    Props to @kakinami and Andy (forgot your username, mate!) for teaching me the gudgeon knot. Definitely worth learning!
     
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  2. Alex82

    Alex82 Regular Member

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    Ah, forgot my goals.
    Main goal: Not loose the fun and passion of stringing. If I loose it, quality will drop and I will loose the second goal.
    Second goal: happy customers

    @mokomima is that a Knipex 7881125 and a MBS flying clamp in your tool tray? :)
    And what do you use for protecting the side arms?

    Thats true. Victor is very very warranty friendly. Sent some rackets to them in the past where you can clearly see that the player hit another racket. Also they replaced some old rackets, which they still have in stock but not for sale anymore.
     
  3. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    @Koyonogood what is your story?!!!

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
     
  4. mokomima

    mokomima Regular Member

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    @Alex82 Yes, you're right. Good eyes;) I bought the two tools because you've inspired me;)
    The black thing next to the Knipex is the Yonex starting clamp.


    I use cheap carbon foil for cars, but I didn't give my best when I put it on so it looks not very clean:D At first I thought about these fish heat shrink tubes that @kakinami mentioned in another thread, but because the arms of the Precision 9 are bent it would be nearly impossible to get them on.
     
  5. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    AHHH The 3rd German was Donald Schutz not Dennis, sorry!! Was Donald stringing? =)
     
  6. mokomima

    mokomima Regular Member

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    Ah ok. Yes, Donald was there too. But I haven't seen him since the German Open 2019 because this year the tournament was cancelled.
     
  7. s_mair

    s_mair Regular Member

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    Great thread and a lot of interesting stories so far. And there are a lot of similarities to my own story. :)

    I started in 2015, mainly because I was completely frustrated with all the (few) available stringing options. The only badminton-focused shop always strings at 22 lbs. regardless of what you order (and is a 45 minutes roundtrip by car away), another hobby club stringer nearby scratched a brand new racket of mine... and thanks to BadmintonCentral I figured that it shouldn't be impossible to get this done for myself and maybe also start stringing for club mates.

    I started with a Pro's Pro Challenger that I didn't like from the start because of its wobbly and dead poor build quality. I ordered Chudek side supports very quickly but still, there were all sorts of issues with that Challenger. Calibration was off by around 3 lbs., the clamps either slipped to squashed the string, the bases had to be re-tightened during every single string job, side supports loosened themselves... yeah, I hated that thing with passion and upgraded after ~30 jobs to a Superstringer T20 which I then upgraded with a WISE another 50 jobs later or so. A great setup overall.
    The final upgrade so far then came in 2019 when I bought a pre-production model of Stringmaster Deluxe that I got sent for testing purposes. It just had everything that I was looking for and I still like everything about it. I can see myself using this setup for many years to come.

    First string job ever took me around 3 hours and ended with me stabbing and killing the string by poking around in a shared hole with a awl. :mad: I later on noticed that I also had mounted the racket one hole off-center at the top, so that the whole job was asymmetrical and the racket was warped like crazy.
    With a lot of help and good advice from BC members and videos by @kwun, @kakinami and others, I think I've reached an acceptable quality level rather soon. At least I started stringing for club mates after around 10 jobs on my own rackets and so far, I haven't had any deadly incidents on the machine (knock on wood!). I did close to 100 rackets in 2019 and been stringing at two local tournaments as well which was a lot of fun and actually also noticeably improved my workflow. I definitely want to continue doing this in the future.
    Due to Covid and all local tournaments being cancelled, I expect a dip to around 80 jobs this year.

    Regarding patterns, I have never really liked the classic Yonex 2-piece pattern for unknown reasons. In the beginning, I was really bad at doing knots, so I started doing 1-piece patterns as my standard very early. I then came across a socalled Haribito Professional that somehow clicked with me immediately. I liked the flow, liked the minimum slack string on the outside and liked the feel of it and decided to take this one as my standard.
    With getting more experience and routine, I implemented some tweaks and changes to the original pattern and ended up with this one that I'm still using mostly these days (only exceptions are hybrid setups of course and Yonex rackets still in warranty):


    Stringing to me is an interesting combination of having to achieve best possible consistency but still having a lot of options and possibilities to reach that goal. Also, there are always new small things that you can improve or tweak to improve the overall result. To some extent, it's almost a little bit of art. These days, I feel like stringing a racket can almost be a meditation moment in which I can relax my mind and let my thoughts wander around.
    Stringing is and should remain only a hobby and with a full time job and two small kids keeping me busy, I'm fine with a rate of 2-3 rackets per week in average maximum. It's still a nice side effect that stringing is making badminton my only hobby that is self-financed. :)
     
    #27 s_mair, Oct 5, 2020
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2020
  8. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    I will finally give my story if you have not seen my video from @ckyew (Thanks by the way, was really fun!!) here is me....
    A long time ago in a galaxy far far away....
    I was making sandwiches at a shop called Togo's in East San Jose, and the guys from the racket shop would come in for lunch. One day one of the managers there asked me if I wanted to make some money, they bought 20,000 Prince Axis badminton rackets that needed to be strung, no joke we unloaded one of the longest trailers that can be towed on a big rig, so I said sure why not. In the shop they had Ektelon H machines, so I started on those and then they eventually upgraded to the Prince Neos 1000. This was in 1995 maybe around December, and started stringing a Prince Axis 64, which took me 2 hours and 40 minutes roughly. My teacher was 1992 US Olympian Ben Lee who lost to the Olympic Silver Medalist Rudi Gunawan, I consider myself to be friends with both people. I do not have a good attention span, so starting stringing badminton rackets was not my ideal job to make some pocket money, but how difficult it was, and time consuming, and frustrating it was I kinda enjoyed it. After about 3 years, I wanted to get better and do more, what could I do?!!! My boss made a call to Yonex and got me an invitation to string at the US Adult Nationals at the Orange County Badminton Club. A few month later in July I was invited back for the 1999 US Open, I brought my Prince Neos 1000 I bought used from Prince for about $600USD. After stringing badminton tournaments, I wanted to refine my tennis stringing. We had a brand of string called Gamma, and the sales rep knew the WTA and ATP local tour stringer, and gave me his contact Sam "The Stringer". In 2003 I tested with Sam and he liked my style and ability to adapt to a machine I have never used before, a Babolat Star 3. I was invited to the San Jose Siebel Open as a back up stringer, mainly there to string his club rackets from the San Francisco Tennis Club. He wanted to see what I could do, so he gave me some less known pros, one of them being Davide Sanguinetti from Italy. I forgot his racket but it was polyester strings at 16kg tension, I had to do a double take because I have never strung below 45 pounds on a tennis racket before, he eventually made it to the finals, losing to Agassi. I was invited to the women's tournament in July (men's tournament was in February) the Bank of the West Classic, and eventually strung for Sam for about 10 years. For the men one of my shining moments was being able to string for Andy Murray who is actually undefeated at that tournament, only played 2 times, but he defended his title. The women in 2014 I was stringing for Sabine Lisicki, but Serena brought in 6 rackets that day (July 30th) so I had to string for Serena and my buddy strung for Sabine. Playing against Ana Ivanovic she hits the fastest women's tennis serve in the world, still the fastest recognized by the WTA. Serena won that year as well as 2012 the year my daughter was born, her name is Kanna Serena.
    As for the badminton side I was a fixture for the US Open from 2005, I started in 1999 but nobody saw me, after getting to work at the 2005 World Championships. Working hard at the US Opens and the 2005 World Championships, the people in upper management saw what I was doing. I eventually got another World Championships in 2011 (London) which was my trial for the Olympics to see how I worked with the UK stringers. I got along with them really well so I got a warm up tournament 2012 All Englands and then the London Olympics. Unfortunately something happened with the Yonex rep (I still to this day do not know what I did to anger him) but the London Olympics was my final tournament. I was scheduled to do the 2013 Pan American Championships but was pulled from that tournament without an explanation, only a "Sorry". I did do the 2009 Pan Am Championships in Guadalajara Mexico 2010 Pan Am Championships Curitiba Brazil 2010 Junior World Championships in Guadalajara Mexico (Met Viktor Axelsen and Kento Momota and Misaki Matsutomo) and the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara Mexico. So Yonex flew me to Mexico 3 times the UK 3 times back home (1 time in first class) and 1 time to Brazil. Fun times.
    As for my hobbies I hate bowling, more I dislike it, been doing it for about 41 years because of my parents, I do have 2 300 games and 1 800 series, I ride a skateboard, and currently live in Chigasaki Japan, a surf city. When I had my shop I was stringing between 2500-3000 rackets a year, living in Japan maybe now 250-300.
    I have enjoyed all of your stories and I hope you enjoy mine!!
     
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  9. Mark A

    Mark A Regular Member

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    I used to send my rackets out by post to be strung. When one went missing (my backup, thankfully) my father suggested I use the compensation to get my own machine - it would pay for itself within the year if I did all the rackets from my club as well.

    So I got the cheapest machine I could find and got cracking, and the compensation cheque from Royal Mail arrived a few days later. The next day, the racket ended up back with me as returned-undeliverable. Result!

    I eventually went electric with an ex-demo WISE - more luck - and then, with yet more luck, Paul was asked to string at the All England for Victor and needed another pair of hands.
     
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  10. speCulatius

    speCulatius Regular Member

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    Thanks @kakinami for this interesting thread!

    I feel like it was a little bit different for me than it was for most. There's a badminton shop closeby (10 minutes walk), run by a realy nice old lady, who likes to talk, so I learned from her that she prefers to string tennis rackets, because she has pretty bad arthritis. She was only my third choice anyway, because I always hat to order 1 kp above my usual tension. The first two choices are in no particular order
    • a stringer from my former club - in the city where I still live - who knows me well, knows my preferences, is a good stringer, but I don't see him often; there was a workaround dropping off the rackets at his brother-in-law's restaurant and picking them up the next day, until that closed
    • a stringer at my club - again, really busy with his day time job, didn't see him often either
    So when the restaurant closed, I learned that @phihag had bought a stringing machine. I kept asking him when he'd start stringing, and apparently I asked one time too much, so he asked me to come over, pick up the machine, learn stringing, and then he could learn from me. Well, part of that happened, but not the latter part.
    So I started stringing on his shuttle express, that is not a great machine, but when being careful mounting the racket, and using some cardboard to protect the string from the gripper, it works fine. I had a steel racket with a bent shaft that I used to practice the first time and the first stringjob took around three hours. I really struggled with the shared holes. I mostly learend from @kwun's videos at the beginning, if I remember correctly.
    Then @s_mair made an offer I could not refuse for his T20 when he got his current machine. He even included some nice Weizen in the package to make it a smooth start. Great guy! Solid machine! I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon, I am not even thinking about a wise yet. While that would certainly safe some time, I don't see the necessity as of yet.
    I started only stringing my own rackets. When others started to find out that I was stringing, I started to get some rackets and now it varies between zero to ten racket's a week, recently getting more though.

    I started with the common YY two piece pattern and still use it whenever it's a YY racket and I'm not sure that the warranty has expired, but I recently tried @s_mair's modified hariboto and there's a lot I like about it. Especially for Adidas Überschall, I recommend these patttern, you just have to flip it upside-down. For other rackets, I guess it's a matter of taste, but I feel like I am about to stick to these for most rackets after trying it for a few times now.

    Goals? Well, for the most part, I would just like to make the people I string for happy by giving them the best quality string job I can, giving the opportunity to try strings, if they want to, being reliable and fast, at least when they need the rackets for a competition. From the feedback I get, I'm doing fine.
    Stringing at a tournament would be a great experience (@mokomima if you need help at the YGO, I can be there in around 30 minutes, otherwise I'm happy with a press pass as a photographer ;):D I think we have played before, if you have played in a team with Florian and you play in Dormagen on Sundays sometimes).

    edit:
    Babolat is so common around here, that I might be one of the few people who don't mind stringing them.
     
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  11. s_mair

    s_mair Regular Member

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    I still have to cringe when thinking about the ridiculously sloppy packaging of the Weizen bottles though... :confused:

    Would be cool to have a video of this flip-flop-upside-down version. :cool:
     
  12. speCulatius

    speCulatius Regular Member

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    I thought about that too late. Just strung both Überschall test rackets I have. Convince Adidas to send me a F3 test racket.... because until the string of a test racket needs to change, it might be a while.
     
  13. mokomima

    mokomima Regular Member

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    Yes, that's me:);)
    Unfortunately because of Corona we don't get the price that we got in the past so we had to look for a new cheaper sports center. So I'm afraid that we won't see us there in the near future, sorry:(

    Babolat is quite ok, but you need to know how to do it. Especially their newer rackets are good. The old ones broke quite easily.
    For me stringing Forza rackets isn't the greatest joy because of their own grommet arrangement, but in the end it's not a big problem:D
     
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  14. Dekkert

    Dekkert Regular Member

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    Well, I started 10 years ago. Before, I always played with around 9,5-10 kg stringjobs. Then, I tried a racket with supposedly 14 kg and liked it. So I decided to get my rackets strung with 13 kg. The troubles started after that. Having to get used to the higher tension and needing to get my timing better, I broke a lot of strings. Sometimes within a few rallies after I got it back. And only my trainer was stringing at my club for €18 a stringjob. After a short while I decided I'd start for myself. It would pay for itself in no time, if I would string for others, which I did. Being a student at the time I bought one of the cheapest stringing machines I could find and bought a Pro's Pro Pioneer drop weight. Did a 1 stringjob course with the seller and hours and hours of reading on this forum. After a short while I replaced the standard K-supports for some slim 4 mm side supports from Gefen sports in London (my sister happened to go on holiday to London and picked me some up) and also bought some load spreaders.

    After hours of reading here and looking for "the best" stringing method I opted to do a two piece top down method with Yonex loop for last two mains and double pull on first two crosses and used this method up untill recently. My first stringjob took me around 3 hours and I got it down to around 30 mins, 25 min tops. I started doing them 1 up/1 down (request 28: M=27 / C=29). Later I tested it against square and changed to square since I liked the feeling better. I never did a lot of testing or trying new things, as I thought that this stringing method was one of the better ones, if not the best. I did try a Haribito ATW stringing method, but more out of necessity, as I had to string some Forza racket that only had 4 shared holes. I used this method two times on my own racket, but stuck to 2PTD. Feeling was allright, but it lost tension much quicker compared to 2PTD.
    In 2012 I briefly spoke to Alan Kakinami at the 2012 All England, as I recognized him from this forum. He then taught me the Gudgeons knot and I used it ever since. Before that I always used a Parnel's know for tie-offs and a bulky starting knot, which both worked fine btw.

    As of lately I got a bit more into trying some things out, especially what would be "the best" method again. There are more and more people sharing their experiences now and you can find more on YouTube, for example the stringing videos from Yonex Stringing team. So @thyrif and I got into doing more online research and decided to do some small tests a short while ago. Hopefully the results can be shared somewhere coming week.

    After watching all those videos and new shared information on this forum, from now on I string 2 piece bottom up. And I like the small mods that Kakinami uses, like the tie-offs at B9. The last two crosses I do reversed and tie off at the last shared hole at the top (if stringing pattern allows that).

    Stringing is just a hobby of me and I get some nice pocket money out of it. I think I string around 10 rackets a month on average. Sometimes I get crazy peak moments like the week before a tournament.

    Current machine is terrible, but can still do the job. All I have to do is be patient and stay calm. The ratcheting system at the gripper is broken, so now it basically is a Pro's Pro Challenger I, but I like it better actually. The base clamps don't slide smoothly anymore, but quite rough, and the clamps themself get looser, so I have to re-tighten them regularly during a stringjob. The base locks don't open up anymore as they supposed to do. They do open, but I have to manually shift them all the way to open. One of the base towers shifts a litte bit over time by around 2 cm. And the dropweight is off by 1 kg.
    I wish I can buy a decent electronic machine somewhere within 1-2 years. If I had to choose now it probably would be the Stringmaster Deluxe.
     
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  15. johnlowe88

    johnlowe88 Regular Member

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    I started playing Badminton around 1980-81 with colleagues at University. I must have had a talent for Badminton because soon I was playing better than they were. I was also breaking strings quite frequently - maybe due to mishits, or maybe due to poor stringing. Anyway after many trips to the local sports store for string repair - yes, at those times, the racquets were repaired by replacing the broken strings - not full restrings. I got fed up with this, so investigated the cost of buying a stringing machine.

    In 1982 - there was little choice of machines - mostly exorbitantly expensive, so found a low cost machine called the Strings All. The machine was out of stock almost everywhere except another sports store said they could order it for me, which they did for around AU$300. Not having a car, I had to carry it back to the University where I worked, about 2km or so.

    StringsAll.jpg
    Here is a picture of the front cover of the manual. The machine pictured is actually mirrored left to right, so the drop bar is on the right top corner. It was great to do my own stringing and repairs, but then I found that I stopped breaking strings as frequently - why? Maybe the technique for repairing strings was the problem, pull the string tight, then jam an awl into the grommet to stop it slippping back - yeap, that might be the cause. But with a machine, I won't need to do that except for knot tying.

    So now I had this machine, that I only used from time to time, so I talked to the manager of the University Sport and Recreation Center - he said, yes - I could do their stringing and repairs for them, so I had my first customer.

    Interesting fact: I was using Gosen HySheep string - my father complained about the smell of the string, so I did most of my stringing in the badly lit garage. It wasn't until I switched to a different less-smelly string that I was able to bring the machine back in the house, maybe 5 years later. Another interesting fact: My Yonex B-8100 Blacken at the time was strung at about 10lbs.

    Now fast forward 38 years to the present - I currently use a Spinfire Flame with Wise 2086 (bought in 2013). I string on average, about 100 racquets a year just as a hobby - maybe a lot less now with Covid. I predominately play with Babolat racquets now, the X-Feel and Satelite series.
     
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  16. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    I think there are new stringers on the forum, I would like to know how they got started? Just trying to revive my thread =) shameless plug.

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
     
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  17. SnowWhite

    SnowWhite Regular Member

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    Your shamelessness has paid off.

    My father strung rackets. He is the kind of person who will take a sport and deepen himself in every single subject. In his youth it was football. For badminton, which he started playing at age 20 and despite this late start he managed to reach a level you wouldn't expect from someone who started that late. Anyway, aside from being a player, he did national coach training courses and became a trainer coach for a regional selection. He was my main coach for a lot of my life. Despite his mediocre technique, he is the one that really taught me that every shot needs to have a purpose, how to set up winners and so on. He is very good at rapidly improving players just by making them aware of tactics and strategy. When age limited his playing, he became an umpire and did that for about a decade before he got tired of the politics.

    Somewhere in the middle he got interested in stringing and learned to string from another stringer, bought a pro's pro challenger (dropweight), (with the ratchet system), which he later replaced with a second hand electronic machine of which I don't know the make. Before he got the electronic one, he taught me to string on the challenger the way he was taught. I started stringing, mostly just my own racket, and only when the string broke, so for a few years I didn't have a lot of experience, but I was always meticulous about stringing my racket because I would be the one who has to play with it. I always took like 2 hours and had my fathers supervision.

    When I was 21 I moved from my native Holland to London for reasons other than badminton. (and btw, the league system and match format in the Netherlands is vastly superior to the decentralized mess that is UK badminton). Because my dad's playing and stringing had slowed down due to age, he sold his electronic machine and I took the pro's pro with me to London. This is where I began stringing for others as well as myself. At this point I had about 70 rackets under my belt and was confident in my abilities. Because I was now responsible for the machine and the strings, I got to experimenting with different tension and strings. I used to play with bg65 at 10 kg(22lbs). Over time I settled on bg80 at 26 lbs. I tried some other stuff, but I always find myself going back to bg80 at 26.

    So far so good. over 100 rackets done. Never broke a racket. Never had a string break on the machine. Some early snaps during play due to adventurous use of awl in shared holes. Happy stringing.

    Then I did one particular racket of one of the players at my club. It was victor lightfighter 7300. Everything was going well, just like any other job. When I got toward the end it broke on the machine. I figured I must have missed a crack on inspection. Trust in stringing is more valuable than the price of one racket, especially in a social club setting where you string for everyone. So I paid him for the racket so he could get a new one. A few weeks later he gave me his other racket, also a lightfighter 7300. I was more careful on this stringjob than I have ever been with any job in my life. It broke in the same place, at the same time in the stringing process as the previous one.

    You can imagine how I felt. How do you come back from something like that? How can anyone trust you with their racket if you broke it twice in a row. My confidence in stringing vanished. For a short while after that I was super nervous when stringing rackets. However, in the end it was probably a good thing that it happened, because I posted here on the forum just to figure out exactly what went wrong. In the end the conclusion was that it was a combination of some suboptimal stringing habits (not straight up mistakes, just things that can be done better in a different way) and the fragility of that specific racket model.

    I used to string in a certain way, because it was the way I was taught. After that incident I changed a bunch of things with help and feedback from the forum. The biggest change was to go bottom up instead of top down on the crosses.

    After a few times doing my own rackets and getting comfortable with the changes, this new way of stringing was put to the test when I received the replacement racket the player had bought to replace the first 7300. It was a victor lightfighter 7400. It went perfectly.


    And everyone lived happily ever after.


    Over the course of stringing for the past few years, I've gotten some very fulfilling reactions from people. That my suggestions and stringjobs have really made a different and given them a feeling with their racket they didn't have before. That I'm the only one so far that has delivered consistent results without breaking the bank. That I'm the only stringer they've encountered that really cares about the result on court.

    I'm now very happy with my stringing process and the results I get.

    As for the machine, I'm aware that here on the forum people don't have the highest opinion of the challenger (or anything pro's pro) and I would agree, but it is the machine I've inherited and I've learned to make it work. I almost immediately removed the ratchet system, because 1. the noise it makes gives you a headache. and 2. it messed up the consistency of my stringing because when pulling I tended to want to reach the next 'click' if it was close enough, instead of focusing on getting the bar to be horizontal. (probably only people who've had this system will know what I mean). I also modified the machine in a way where I can bolt the side supports onto the arms of the machine, whereas before they would rest loosely into a well fitting hole. The idea was that you can rotate the supports to better fit the frame of the racket, but I really didn't like the looseness of it. So I replaced the bottom screwed in notches with a bolt of the same size that fastens the side support from the bottom.


    Thank you all for the lessons (especially @s_mair @stradrider, and @flyingcords) and happy stringing:D
     
    Cheung, BadminFinn, thyrif and 4 others like this.
  18. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    Interesting story! I would think you would want to use that machine because it belonged to your father, sentimental reasoning. I played clarinet in high school and after I graduated I found out my dad played clarinet, he never talked much about himself. But I later found his clarinet at my grandmothers home and I wanted to play it. I still have it at home with my other things in the States but things from my parents are special to me. For a time I wore my late grandfathers fishing hat because I thought it was cool and it belonged to him. My dad was a wrestler too, I didn't know until after I graduated and by coincidence I wrestled same weight as him (112lbs). Sentimental things are special to some people, junk to others, its all in the eye of the beholder. Arigato!

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
     
  19. SnowWhite

    SnowWhite Regular Member

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    I don't have that kind of relationship with the machine. The aspect I most enjoy about my stringing machine is the price I paid for it, which is £0,-. I care far more about how it helps me string my rackets exactly the way I want them.

    When it comes to my father, I'm much more grateful for his training and coaching when I was younger, his efforts in making me a better player, and his support in driving me around to training sessions far more than can be reasonably expected from a parent. Even now that there is much more distance between us (physical distance), we can talk about badminton for hours and I treasure the bond that I have with him. Even when playing, certain tactical motifs or certain shots will remind me of him. Maybe I will care more about things that used to belong to him when he is no longer here.
     
    kakinami likes this.
  20. kakinami

    kakinami Regular Member

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    Shameless plug again! Any new stringers want to tell how they got started? Love reading stories!

    Sent from my LG-US998 using Tapatalk
     
    s_mair and kwun like this.

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