LOL I am not new but here’s my story. Back in the very early 90’s, a close friend of mine said he was buying a drop weight machine to string his own tennis racquets and that it could be used for badminton. The pricing got me interested as the machine was less than £300 but taking your racquets to a shop would cost £12 per racquet for the labour charge. Even if I was just stringing for myself, it would take me less than two years to break even so the economics were quite clear. The shop I bought from were tennis people but they taught me the basics of stringing a badminton racquet. I started off fairly slowly because I wasn’t able to play much - I had just graduated and was doing 100h working weeks. Stringing was quite therapeutic and I was experimenting with my own midrange racquets at tensions less then 24lbs. I moved back to London, but didn’t push the stringing too much given that there were a few people in the badminton community already doing their own stringing. More market choice for the consumer and those others had better machines. The machine at this stage had paid for itself as I did do some racquets for friends. Later, I moved to Hong Kong for work and sold the machine on. Got a good price for it! In Hong Kong, labour charge for stringing is the equivalent of £5 per racquet. With the limited living space in Hong Kong, it wasn’t worth buying a new machine nor keeping one at home taking up living area. Work and career were taking up a lot of time as well. Some years later, I was on a bulletin board for badminton. These were the early days of the internet and this particular bulletin board was hosted by Harvard University. One user based in the US posted a question wondering why his badminton racquet stringing pattern from the shop there looked very odd. I correctly diagnosed that with the low popularity of US badminton and less experience of stringing racquets, the shop had not skipped a vertical string on the sides. In the late 90’s, there were only words - no pictures and it was pretty novel to feel you could provide a diagnosis and solution to a physical problem across the world from another country in another time zone. I never got back into stringing but the guy I helped must have got quite annoyed because he later started stringing himself, created a badminton website and forum and made stringing videos to be posted on YouTube that have helped loads of people learn how to string. You guys might know him If I were to move back to England, I would probably take up stringing again with an electronic machine and asking for advice on the forum.
I mean.. you can't blame that strange guy... Just looking at this thread! https://badmintoncentral.com/forums/index.php?threads/the-bc-chamber-of-stringing-horrors.165842/ What happened is that the stringer only did 20x23. Completely omitting the outer 2 main strings. Imagine the horror and the trauma that follows that the details of it is still very vivid 25 yrs later!
Haha, that's really terrible! However I am a little bit thankful to him as well since that terrible stringer unintentionally became a catalyst to inspire that other "strange guy" for creating an amazing resource that me personally and, I would guess, lots and lots of people are really grateful for!
What really got me into stringing was the jobs from other people were just never the right tension, also having to wait forever to get the racket back. Where I am from, there weren't many choices to pick from. I picked up badminton as a hobby back in 2009. First time I had it done at a tennis store but the strings broke within a week. Had a friend tell me they nicked his badminton strings when doing his rackets. I had my rackets strung by an older guy for about a year and stuck with BG-65s so I wouldn't have to get it done often. While I was in school, I had picked up a part time job at a Big Canadian Sports store. I had the guy do my rackets a few times at the store, but it was very mediocre. Eventually I started to learn how to do it, and was stringing for myself and the friend who had his strings nicked (Still doing his rackets till this day). In 2012, my final year of school, the store I was working in was moving to a different location, and was planning on trashing the old machine (Prince Neos 1000) I've been stringing on. My manager was cool and basically gave it to me. From there, I strung around 500-700 rackets on that Neos, buying a Wise 2086 for it. Eventually the machine clamp down mechanism broke and I had to get a new machine. Since then I've learned so much from this forum about patterns and techniques. A few years of experience, took me around 25 minutes to do one racket, but now I can do a racket in around 16-17 minutes. My dream machine is a Victor VE-80 or a Protech 8. I get jealous seeing some of you guys with these
16-17 mins is really good. I still remember even @kakinami had to take a few deep breaths to cool his nerves before doing a 16mins.
Hey guys, Andrew here from Canada. My story started when I first started playing the game as a teenager (2001). The club I went to was introduced to me by my gym teacher/coach. He ran the club out of our high school in the evenings and urged me to join. My love for the game was formed. Fast forward to 2011 and the club was now operated and owned by myself and another colleague. Our goal has always been the same as When my gym teacher/coach was running the club. Introducing badminton throughout the community especially to our younger generations. Which brings me to my stringing years (2015- present) Stringing racquets has always fascinated and intrigued me to learn how to do it. I’ve always brought my racquet to the nearby sport shop that mainly strings tennis racquets. I had very limited choices at the time. The badminton pro shop was such a far distance and had such long turnaround time. So I started watched videos on badminton stringing patterns, stringing tie off knots and starting knots. Over and over again. Different channels, reading various stringing forums, studying pictures of patterns. I bought my first gamma stringing machine and after about a year of stringing my own racquets I figured it was time to share my services to my club. Another few years pass stringing and operating the club and I decided to upgrade my machine. Researching various machines I narrowed my choices down to two. The li Ning e5000 and the yonex protech 8. Two beautiful machines. Was a very hard decision to make but since I had to think practical I chose the li Ning E5000 since it was significantly cheaper than the yonex. Since then I have grown to string for the majority of our club members and a few other clubs in our city. After years of experience, I’ve enjoyed helping others with their gear and give advice and input that help them optimize their string and racquet needs for better performance on court. Badminton has always been a passion of mine since I started playing. I now share that passion with my wife, our children and our entire community. It’s been great to share my story with you guys and I hope to inspire more people throughout my life. Baddy on everyone!
Found this thread of posts by chance and found all stories to be unique and interesting. My story is somewhat cliche. I started learning to play badminton in HK when I was 16 for a couple of years, then in London with friends for another couple of years when I was about 30, and restarted in the beginning of this year. I've bought a few near-top end racquets that I cherish. I either have a French sporting goods retailer or one of those drop-string-collect services in London. Never thought of stringing racquets myself because of the cost and size of a machine. Not long before the lock-down, I bought a Forza Light 9.9 from new. Played it with stock string for a year and thought restringing it would make it more lifely in the games, so I used a drop-string-collect service near my workplace. The racquet returned with a cracked frame!! See another post of mine for repeated details. Obviously, the stringer denied all responsibility even for a racquet that had been used on less than 20 occasions. I was upset, to say the least. Then string on another racquet of mine snapped. At the moment when my trust in others is at the lowest level, I looked at the DIY option. I have to credit members of this forum who have shown great support and encouragement, especially @kakinami. Gained approval from the minister of home affairs (a.k.a. wife) and bought a 2nd hand Pro's Pro Challenger from an online auction website. So far, I've strung about 8 racquets, some mine, some friends. I've been stringing for free of charge to gain experience. Not going to lie, it has been a painful process for each of those racquets, painful probably for me and for the racquet. Luckily, the richness of useful information from BC and youtube makes the learning journey a rather enjoyable one. I am more confident now but knowing I have so much more to learn, I know I will be bothering the good members of this forum with all my trivial questions, so apologies and thank you in advance for your help and patience.
No question os trivial! It is good to hear how yoy started stringing! Of course in the begining it is a pain to learn, catching a mistake after you have tied your knot and cut your tails, but to me this is an artform, you are creating something for others to enjoy, so to me stringing gives me happiness that other people can enjoy my work and for some people my art helped people gain financially as well as win some tournaments. I can try to help answer questions but unfortunately I am not a technical stringer, I just do what I want to do. A good guy to probably PM and ask queations is @s_mair @kwun @thyrif @tjiew @mokomima @Alex82 @DuckFeet @Mark A @speCulatius @Dekkert those guys are always posting giving good feedback. Keep on stringing and your hard work will bring joy to others! Sent from my LG-US998 using Tapatalk
Hello, I can't really say that I really started racket stringing, but here it goes. Back in the days, I started playing with 1 racket, a Carlton 3.7X. When it required re-stringing a good friend of mine would take it to a stringer in Mongkok, Kowloon to have it done. I was told many Hong Kong players had their rackets done by that stringer. And I was happy with the string jobs. Later I got to know my coach and I saw him stringing his racket manually. I asked if he could do my racket as i wanted to learn. I remember he did my racket 4 times - once with the Gosen Hysheep, 2 times with Gosen Super Hysheep and 1 with gut string. I found that i enjoyed the feeling of my racket much better strung by my coach. My coach eventually left and went back to China, I did not do much about racket stringing as in those days I could not find any tools available locally. Fast forward a few years, I had a friend that started a sports shop and was able to buy a stringing machine - a Fleet floor standing manual crank machine. The price was not bad I think I paid around CAD $500 for it at that time. There was not internet at that time, my experience then was trying to recollect the steps and instructions of my coach stringing techniques as I always watched him string my racket - always start with the mains, then the crosses; the crosses MUST be from top to down to avoid changing the shape of the racket head. I tried a few rackets before moving to Canada. I brought the stringing machine to Canada, but due to my priorities here I have barely touched the stringing machine for the past 20 years. I have a bit more time now I want to go back and start to play around with the machine and look to learn and improve my skills in this area. I have a question for the experts here regarding the stringing - as per prior instructions, the crosses should start from top to bottom. Many videos on racket stringing (i.e. Yonex), the crosses start from the bottom. My machine do not have the side support like most current machines, only the racket holding and 2 clamps that travel on rods and do not turn. Is it possible to do the crosses in my machine that do not have the side support for rackets from bottom to top without deforming the racket head? The clamps in my stringing machine looks like the one in this picture https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7O63-Abl...VihAKCZmL5F79MgCKgB/s1600/20160508_014205.jpg Thank you for the assistance.
Hi! Perhaps this thread of experiments will give you some thoughts: https://badmintoncentral.com/forums...how-do-you-want-to-deform-your-racket.188125/ For bottom-up the bottom is getting wider and the top is getting thinner than unstrung shape. We have noted some tension theories to getting the best shape retention. Note that 6 o clock adjustment is a lot trickier with a 2 point machine. Perhaps the opposite is true for top-down (wide top, thin bottom), but we have not tested. Yonex recommends bottom up, because they found less breakages this way. Good luck!
Thank you for the link. I have done my rackets in the past, around 4-10 times/year, tension at 25 lbs max. No problems following the vintage recommendations so far, that is crosses from top to bottom.
I was also taught to go from top to bottom on the crosses. The racquet frames were traditional oval design. I never went above 25lbs but my machine did also have two side supports. Could things have changed with the isometric design making stringing the mains from bottom to top became more popular? I broke a couple of the early isometrics (800 and slim 10) using HK stringers. That time was a transition phase to isometric design and possibly my racquets were done from top to bottom. I hadn’t gone to above 25lbs tension with those racquets. I speculate from that time, the change from starting from bottom to top for mains started coming in.
Saw this post while browsing the forums so why not respond. I started stringing because I moved for university and the stringer there overcharges to string rackets. I normally get it strung $30 CAD or less and he's charging $50-60. Started off with a hand-me-down kilpermate drop weight machine. Used that for 4 months and decided I should upgrade. Now using a penta premium 3600 with a wise tension head and it does wonders. Now I string for the club at the school I’m attending and average around 20 rackets a month. Been stringing for a total of less than a year and have strung over 100 rackets. It would be nice to be able to string for bigger clubs or tournaments and make it a full time job but as for now I can only dream about it haha. Would also be cool to meet people from this forum in person and learn from them or just talk to them. Huge thanks to @kakinami for posting those amazing youtube videos really helped a lot when learning to string.
Nice to have some extra pocket money. $50 CAD for a racquet string? Players in the area must have a lot of spare cash or suffering a lot.
Wow 50$ a racket is nuts, which university do you go to? I was recently able to hit the 15 minute mark. Been trying to get it down to 14 minutes but haven't had success. Before I was using a Wise 2086 with a Victor VM2000s. I was luckily able to sell this setup and switched to a Victor VE-50. The machine definitely was worth the upgrade.
