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String movement

Q: Why do some strings move more than others on impact with the ball?

A: From what we can tell, it is not that some strings move and others do not, it is that some strings move back into position after moving, while others do not. You can easily check this out for yourself. Play with a set of strings until they get good and grimy. At this point, the mains and crosses will have so much friction between them that it is difficult to straighten them.

Now, rub down the strings with car wax. This cleans and lubricates the strings, permitting the mains and crosses to move across each other more easily … maybe even more easily than when they were new.

There are two observations to be made from this experiment. First, even when the strings were so stuck that they were difficult to straighten, they still got knocked out of whack during play. This implies that it is difficult to prevent string movement in the first place, short of physically bonding the strings to each other at the intersections.

Second, clean and lubricated strings, which slide across each other easily, must be moving a lot during play, even though they look as though they have not moved at all, by virtue of having returned to their original positions by themselves. It might be said that strings that need to be straightened after every shot are actually moving less than strings that don’t.

From the May 2004 issue
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