Tag: Badminton Racquet Stringing Footer

Articles in this archive are included in product page footers pertaining to badminton racquet stringing services offered by Racquet Network.

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Save $200 Stringing Yonex Badminton Racquets

Great news for Yonex fans in Calgary. Our Yonex badminton racquet program just got even better.

There is no point in buying your Yonex racquets anywhere else because nobody can beat this deal.

Starting today, every customized Yonex ™ badminton racquet purchased in-store now comes with $200 in free stringing upgrades.

But wait! There’s more …

Customers who purchase these racquets from us will save time as well as money because they will be able to automatically upgrade from basic labour (one week turnaround) to guaranteed one-hour stringing at no extra charge.

Yonex Astrox Series

Racquet Network’s new badminton program saves you $20 every time you string your racquet. It also cuts down on the number of trips you have to make to our store.

Here is how things normally work.

  1. Break a string.
  2. Bring racquet to the store.
  3. Go home and wait for email notification.
  4. Come back to the store a few days later to pick your racquet up.

In other words, you make two trips to the store.

Here is how things work now.

  1. Break a string.
  2. Book an appointment.
  3. Bring your racquet to the store.
  4. Wait 30 minutes and then take your racquet home with you.

In order words, you only come to the store once.

Yonex Duora Series

The new system also saves you money. Guaranteed one-hour racquet service normally costs $40.00 plus the cost of string. Under the new program, it costs the same as one-week service: $20 plus the cost of string.

So players who are participating in our new program save $200 and 10 trips to the store, which more than pays for the cost of a new racquet.

This is because when you purchase a new Yonex badminton racquet from us, we automatically include $200 worth of stringing upgrades.

Yonex Nanoray Series

While this is awesome deal for anybody who lives in southwest Calgary, this is an even better deal for badminton players who live far from our store because it saves them even more time and more money on racquet stringing services.

Program Details

Our new badminton program, therefore, continues to be the best overall program in Calgary for badminton players who want to save time, save money and play with the best badminton racquets in the world. In addition to those three things, our program is also best for the environment because it reduces car trips and keeps racquets out of the landfills for longer.

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Why Do Strings Break?

Squash racquet with broken string
When a string breaks, don’t assume that your stringer did something wrong.
Here at Racquet Network, our stringers re-string nearly 2000 racquets a year. Less than a dozen racquets a year come back for warranty repairs.

This means that 99.994% of the racquets we repair are fine while 0.006% experience premature string breakage.

Yet in almost every one of the 0.006% of cases where strings break prematurely, the customer wants to blame us for doing something wrong. They seem to believe that when a string breaks, it has to be somebody’s fault.

This is a primer for those folks. The purpose of this article is to share our considerable experience about why strings break and to help players understand why this happens to them.

Don’t Take it Personally

The first thing to understand is that it’s not personal. Nobody is picking on you. It’s not a conspiracy.

All strings break eventually. Sometimes they break the first time you use them. Sometimes they last for years. When a racquet is strung, nobody knows how long it is going to last.

Your racquet might be in the 99.994% that are fine or it might be in the 0.006% that break prematurely. There is simply no way to know.

Even a perfect racquet that is perfectly strung by the world’s best stringer with the world’s best string on the world’s best stringing machine under perfect conditions can break the very first time you hit a ball or a shuttle with it. That’s a coincidence, not a conspiracy.

That said, however, there are come common causes for string breakage that we see regularly.

Racquet Maintenance Issues

Most often, the problem is with the bumper guard or grommets on the racquet itself. If grommets are broken, the graphite from the frame will cut through the string. If you are using a soft multifilament string like Tecnifibre ™ 305 or DNAMX, your string life can be extremely short.

The same is true for broken bumper guards. If the string in a racquet is passing over jagged pieces of bumper guard, there is a high likelihood that your strings will break prematurely. This is also true if missing pieces of bumper are exposing the string to wall/floor strikes on the outside of the frame.

Customer Usage

The second most common cause of string breakage is directly related to how customers use string. In squash, for example, we commonly see problems with men who overpower their string by literally hitting the ball much harder than they need to.

In this case, the story goes something like this.

A guy buys a squash racquet with thick, low grade factory string. He plays squash for a while and learns to serve overhand and to hit the ball really, really hard. Since the factory strings that were in the racquet when he purchased it are thick and designed for durability rather than playability, the player experiences no consequences for hitting this hard.

Eventually, however, the strings in the racquet break and the player brings the racquet in for re-stringing. For whatever reason, he decides to go with a highly playable string like Tecnifibre 305 or DNAMX, which are both playable but not very durable. So to nobody’s surprise, he goes out onto the court, pounds his first serve and immediately breaks his expensive new string.

Nobody is at fault here. This is simply physics. The strength of the player overpowers the strength of the string. This string is designed for professional squash players who consistently hit the ball in the centre of the stringbed. It is not designed for overhead pounders who hit the ball hard and off centre.

This is our second most common cause of string breakage; it is a player/string mismatch. The player and the string are both fine on their own; they are just wrong for each other.

This player needs a durable string, not a playable string. Once this is determined, we can advise players in this group to go with a more durable string, like Ashaway ™ Supernick XL Titanium.

The important thing to understand here is that nobody can know that the player and the string are wrong for each other until they try to play together. This is a matter of trial and error. Until they try, the error cannot be detected.

Conclusion

So the next time your string breaks prematurely, please don’t jump immediately to the conclusion that your stringer did something wrong. Given how we do things in our shop, this is highly unlikely and we suspect this is true for most professional stringers. A more likely explanation is that something else is at fault. Just bring your racquet in for us to look at. We will probably be able to figure out what happened and we will probably be able to help put you back into the 99.994% group.

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How to Save Money on Custom Racquet Stringing

Want to enjoy all of the benefits of custom racquet stringing without paying full price for everything? Try pre-ordering online. Then drop your racquet off whenever it’s convenient.

You will get exactly the same result as when you come into the store and place your order in person, but you will save money every time.

Pre-ordering your stringing this way allows us to save on staffing costs. So we can pass the savings on to you.

As an added bonus, our system will automatically send you a 10% discount on your next stringing purchase if you submit a review within 30 days.

That’s all there is to it. You already know what you want, so order it online and save some money. We will do the rest.

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A Beginner’s Guide to On-the-Spot Racquet Stringing

Our On-the-Spot Racquet Stringing program is very popular. Simply bring your racquet into our store any Sunday afternoon from 1:00-4:00pm and we will string it while you wait for just $20.00, string and labour included. It’s a great program that has saved a lot of squash, tennis, badminton and racquetball players a lot of money since we introduced it in 2017.

Not everybody is happy about it, though. There are some people who try to game the system and end up genuinely upset when we stop them from getting their way. The purpose of this article is to let everybody know the rules so that we can prevent problems before they happen.

Rule #1 – Nobody Gets Special Treatment

All of the rules are fair. They apply equally to everyone. There are no exceptions. Every week, for example, we have somebody who comes in a few hours early and tries to drop their racquet off. “I’ll be back to pick it up later,” they say. “No. No. No. No. No,” we say. “Nobody takes short cuts. We don’t allow that.” So they end up leaving angry.

Rule #2 – Sign Up Starts at 12:45pm

The sign up rules have been set in stone since Day One of this program. Sign ups must be in person and first come first serve. If the racquet you are getting strung was purchased from us, you can sign up anytime after 12:45 pm. If you did not purchase the racquet from us, you can sign up anytime after 1:00 pm. If you are not in the room when we call your name, we move on to the next person.

Common questions about this… All answered no … Can I sign up early? Can I sign up over the phone? Can I reserve a spot? Can my friend sign me up? Can I leave my racquet here now and come back after 1:00 when it is done? Like we said. The answers to all of these questions is no. So please don’t ask.

Rule #3 – Do Not Leave the Store

Another common question: can I leave the racquet with you and come back later? Again, if you want on-the-spot stinging the answer is no. If you want to run out to the bathroom or go get a coffee, that’s OK. But this is a stringing-while-you-wait program. Not a drop-it-off-and-pick-it-up-later program. If you leave, we will take your racquet off the stringing machine and move on to the next customer.

Rule #4 – No Outside String

Would you take your own meat into a steakhouse and ask the chef to cook it for you so you can save some money? Would you take your own rice to a Chinese restaurant or your own bread to a deli? Of course not. So please don’t bring string to our stringing store. We sell string. More than 150 different kinds of string. More than anybody else in Calgary.

Rule #5 – One Racquet Per Person

Each person is limited to one racquet per day. If you have two racquets to do, you can come on two different Sundays. Nobody walks in with an arm full of racquets and forces everybody behind them to wait. This is a firm limit. One racquet per person per Sunday. No exceptions. So don’t ask.

Parting Thoughts

We started our On-the-Spot Racquet Stringing program so that we could get to know our customers and so that our customers could get to know us a little better. That tends to happen when people spend an hour or two together every few months. However, not everyone is equally good at waiting. In fact, even the idea of waiting is enough to make some people grumpy. If you are one of those people, we strongly suggest our “Just the Basics” racquet stringing program. It’s the same result, without having to wait around the store.