Reading through various posts about stringing on this board, many conjectures that are taken as gospel around here have very little connection to physics in the real world. But people swear by them, so they live on.
I would like to contribute my own little theory to the pool and in the process, open up a whole new Pandora's box that could be used to generate some extra revenue for stringers. The best thing about this theory that it does have some real physics background, though, whether or not it really matters is up for debate.
The idea is frequency matching.
What does that mean? First, a little physics primer.
When a ball meets the stringbed, how much the strings deform and how fast they return to their original position (and much of the "feel") are related to its vibrational frequency. That frequency is determined by thickness, material, span length, and tension. If the frequencies between each string (individual mains and crosses) are not matching each other, some will rebound little faster and some will rebound little slower - end result being they will fight each other's actions and make the whole string bed less effecient.
"Frequency Matching" can solve that problem. You can test each string as you string for their frequency and try to match each cross and main string to match frequencies of each other, making the whole string bed to work as one. (Just like what Davydenko is doing with by stringing the end crosses looser)
You can even take that to another level by finding the frequency of the racquet itself and find a harmonic frequency that will unite the racquet and strings together.
I am actually bit surprised that stringers don't offer this service already. Something very similar to this is already available for golf clubs.
Now, would this result in something that you can actually feel or make your swing better? Who knows? If nothing else, it can have some very strong placebo effect (although by mentioning it I am already greatly reducing that possibility).
But if Extenze can sell millions of caffeine pills as "male performance enhancer", I can see how a service like this could become very popular.
All you would need to do frequency matching would be a basic oscilloscope to measure the frequencies.
What say you?
I would like to contribute my own little theory to the pool and in the process, open up a whole new Pandora's box that could be used to generate some extra revenue for stringers. The best thing about this theory that it does have some real physics background, though, whether or not it really matters is up for debate.
The idea is frequency matching.
What does that mean? First, a little physics primer.
When a ball meets the stringbed, how much the strings deform and how fast they return to their original position (and much of the "feel") are related to its vibrational frequency. That frequency is determined by thickness, material, span length, and tension. If the frequencies between each string (individual mains and crosses) are not matching each other, some will rebound little faster and some will rebound little slower - end result being they will fight each other's actions and make the whole string bed less effecient.
"Frequency Matching" can solve that problem. You can test each string as you string for their frequency and try to match each cross and main string to match frequencies of each other, making the whole string bed to work as one. (Just like what Davydenko is doing with by stringing the end crosses looser)
You can even take that to another level by finding the frequency of the racquet itself and find a harmonic frequency that will unite the racquet and strings together.
I am actually bit surprised that stringers don't offer this service already. Something very similar to this is already available for golf clubs.
Now, would this result in something that you can actually feel or make your swing better? Who knows? If nothing else, it can have some very strong placebo effect (although by mentioning it I am already greatly reducing that possibility).
But if Extenze can sell millions of caffeine pills as "male performance enhancer", I can see how a service like this could become very popular.
All you would need to do frequency matching would be a basic oscilloscope to measure the frequencies.
What say you?
