Some people have mentioned this before:
* Nikolay Davydenko strings his racquets progressively: ie. low tension on the top, and increasing toward the bottom.
* Wilson Pro Stuff 6.0 95 reportedly has a dead zone in the top part of the face. Some posters recommended progressive stringing to rectify this.
The question was, though, does the progressive tension work ?
(or does the tension just redistributes itself and evens everything out ? )
Since the string had popped on that racquet for me about a month ago, I decided to give progressive tension a go. I strung Wilson with 52 lbs at the top, progressively increasing to 56 lbs at the bottom. Today, I must say that it does work.
Shots from the upper half of the hoop fly off with much more power and pace than those from the bottom. I thought that the effect was temporary, and that after some heavy hitting, the tensions throughout the face will re-distribute, and the effect will disappear. But now a month had passed, and the effect is still there.
Second event reinforced my belief today that the effect will last. A string just popped in my other racquet. I played at lunch, but got to the racquet only after dinner. When I started cutting out the old string, I was surprised to see that all neighboring strings maintained their high tension. I would have thought that after ~6 hours in the bag, with one string popped, all strings will become loose. Nothing like this happened. The racquet creaked and sprung each time I cut one level deeper.
So, it appears that the string tension does not redistribute itself to the adjacent strings.
Has anyone else notice this? What are your observations?
I know this comes up pretty often in stringing questions: what if I descrease tension on this pull? what if I pull 2 together? etc. The answer usually is that on the next pull the tension will re-distribute and you should not worry much about the previous pull (or the tension on the last cross, or whether you are pulling at a steep angle through some grommets and thus losing a lot of tension to friction on some pulls).
* Nikolay Davydenko strings his racquets progressively: ie. low tension on the top, and increasing toward the bottom.
* Wilson Pro Stuff 6.0 95 reportedly has a dead zone in the top part of the face. Some posters recommended progressive stringing to rectify this.
The question was, though, does the progressive tension work ?
(or does the tension just redistributes itself and evens everything out ? )
Since the string had popped on that racquet for me about a month ago, I decided to give progressive tension a go. I strung Wilson with 52 lbs at the top, progressively increasing to 56 lbs at the bottom. Today, I must say that it does work.
Shots from the upper half of the hoop fly off with much more power and pace than those from the bottom. I thought that the effect was temporary, and that after some heavy hitting, the tensions throughout the face will re-distribute, and the effect will disappear. But now a month had passed, and the effect is still there.
Second event reinforced my belief today that the effect will last. A string just popped in my other racquet. I played at lunch, but got to the racquet only after dinner. When I started cutting out the old string, I was surprised to see that all neighboring strings maintained their high tension. I would have thought that after ~6 hours in the bag, with one string popped, all strings will become loose. Nothing like this happened. The racquet creaked and sprung each time I cut one level deeper.
So, it appears that the string tension does not redistribute itself to the adjacent strings.
Has anyone else notice this? What are your observations?
I know this comes up pretty often in stringing questions: what if I descrease tension on this pull? what if I pull 2 together? etc. The answer usually is that on the next pull the tension will re-distribute and you should not worry much about the previous pull (or the tension on the last cross, or whether you are pulling at a steep angle through some grommets and thus losing a lot of tension to friction on some pulls).