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They do look like Daytons, don’t they? Which would put this as 1922 earliest. Can’t make out the other rackets or anything else that could give us a clue (there’s a strange zigzagging shape at the bottom of the net post but this could just be a shadow!). Could this be Coolidge era? Though...

Our correspondent in the thread below was in Western Japan but maybe there are similar thrift stores in Tokyo? https://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/index.php?threads/classic-racquet-hunt-in-japan-op-shops.633569/

Wot he said - RL-010, early 80s.

Another vote for Slazenger. I live in hope of Sumitomo finding some spare pennies behind the couch and buying and transforming Slazenger like they have done Dunlop.

Martin Cora at the Museo Argentino del Tenis (check Facebook, instagram) has been doing some remarkable work logging the early Maxplys. Well worth a look.

Punderstruck!

Now we come to the curios. From a little place in Mortlake, this Donnay Ghost with its collagen-pumped frame for £5: And finally, bedfellows in a bucket in a Wimbledon high street shop, these two £5 frames, which I suspect were donated by the same person. He certainly had esoteric tastes…...

Before covid, the first days of Wimbledon were productive times for a racket collector to be doing the rounds of the charity shops in South West London. Last year was unsurprisingly fallow in that regard and my expectations were accordingly low as the first shop opened its doors to my eager face...

This is the Star from 1915/1916. It was the first racket sold by the Ashland Manufacturing Company, the predecessor in title to Wilson, and sold for 75cents. It is ludicrously light compared to its contemporaries from Wright & Ditson, Spalding, Horsman etc - not a serious racket by any means.

Being an ignorant consumer at heart (given some of the dodgy frames in my collection) I am tempted by this one but I think @Grafil Injection may be in the uk too so could be interested. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/449241766961164/

Slightly off topic but has anyone (@Grafil Injection ?) heard of the Dunlop Court Star? Just seen an ad for a batch of rackets including this frame, which has IMF stylings but I’ve never heard of it before:

This, 100% this. The fruits of Donnay’s forays into turbo-cardboard racket construction. Think Vijay Amritraj may have used it to fend off the baddies in Octopussy, which given its composition must be the most unbelievable moment in the whole film (take a seat, crocodile submarine).

Nope but mine is one of the vortex-strung numbers:

Current bucket list is anything the Wimbledon Museum have stashed away per the link below: https://collections.wimbledon.com/objects?query=object_type%3A%22Tennis+equipment%22 In particular, that glorious prototype Dunlop Maxply: Just for @retrowagen, this is my hoard of Streamlines (I have...

No Kuebler doesn’t mention the racket in his book or the 2 supplements, I’m afraid. The writing around the number wedge design appears from the book to originate with the early “The Tournament” rackets (Kuebler dates these to 1895) so on that basis your racket dates from after then. He also...

George G Bussey & Co were a celebrated manufacturer of cricket, lawn tennis and other sports implements in the late 19th and early 20th century, operating out of a landmark factory in Peckham, South London. They never belonged to the top rank of racket manufacturers such as Tate, Jefferies...

It comes in at 360g, which is probably fairly on-market given the weight lost from the lack of a throat. I had exactly the same thoughts as you about whether this could have been a cheap frame built to catch the eye (and save on materials while they were at it!) rather than to be playable. To...

Thanks gents, I am liking this excised wedge theory - I’ve added some photos below of the shoulders and bridge as well as of the logos and laminated construction decals. Thanks to @Bagumbawalla I have taken a spin through Google images of Regent rackets and, while I am finding it hard to match...

Happy new year everyone. I have a bit of a head scratcher for the budding Sherlocks of this forum on which, as ever, I would be grateful for your collective wisdom. Does anyone have any ideas who manufactured this racket and when? It is a curiosity because it seems to be a 1930s racket with...

I am currently slogging through Victorian sporting journals from 1874 onwards to find old racket ads and tennis articles, correspondence etc. At some point I will collate all of it into something on the Really Ancient History thread but thought this racket ad from September 1881 might be of...

The first Ultra Kevlar you feature above is mine - I can upload a few more photos tonight.

The Birmal had the same steel strings as the Dayton. Having hit some balls with a Birmal and a 1924 New Dayton, I think the Dayton is the better racket…

As an addendum to the above, these are the earliest examples of metal rackets that I have seen advertised (from The Field of August 1886). The adverts are next to each other and both have a Coventry connection so I suspect they were both forged in the same Midlands bicycle workshop. I...

Here’s the patent:

They were quite the marketing sensation for from 1924 to 1925 and then were never heard of again (or at least were never mentioned in any UK newspaper after 1925)

Interestingly, Molla Bjurstedt (later Mallory), the Norwegian-born and US-naturalised player who was on the other side of the net in one of Lenglen’s more controversial matches (when she retired citing shortness of breath after losing the first set against Mallory in the 1921 US Open), notes in...

Suzanne Lenglen played an evenly balanced c. 13.5 oz racket early in her career (the extract below is from her 1920 book), with apparently a 5” handle (she notes with relief that this is a more sensibly sized handle following the end of the big-handled fad!). In another part of the book she says...

The MacGyver of rackets! You said above that this is more over-engineered than other collapsible rackets - is the Jeanrot only 2 attachable segments? There is an A-460 online that I have been toying with getting for about 6 months now…

Take a gander at Richard Sears’s 16oz cudgel in the first US championship in 1881 (from Henry Slocum’s 1890 “Tennis in our own country”), the first of his seven singles titles on the bounce:

Ignoring the fact that lots of people did, indeed, seem to like it.