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Matching older frames

Q: A lot of the guys I play with at my local public courts use ancient racquets. They obviously love these racquets, but they wouldn’t be opposed to buying new racquets if they could find something that matched — without having to demo every frame under the sun. I should mention that these frames are so old that there are no specs on RacquetTECH.com.

A: Most of the specs on RacquetTECH.com are for racquets released since the mid-1994 arrival of the Babolat RDC machine, which allowed us to get the specs for new racquets quickly and easily. It seems as if we’ve been publishing these specs forever, but there are still a lot of older frames running around out there.

To make the process of finding a new racquet as painless as possible, you need to get as much information as you can about the old racquet. Weight and balance are pretty easy to obtain, so at a minimum you should have that information. However, to really winnow down the new-racquet options, you need to get the swingweight of the old racquet. This means finding someone who has a swingweight tester, although USRSA members can also use a stopwatch and the Swingweight Calculator on-line at RacquetTECH.com. If you can also get a flex reading, that’s great, but even without knowing the flex, you’re way ahead of the game. Look for racquets that have similar weight, balance, swingweight, and whatever other characteristics are beloved in the old racquet. USRSA members can use the Racquet Selector feature on-line at RacquetTECH.com to speed up this step.

Once you find some likely replacements, start playtesting the most flexible frames first, and work up to the stiffer frames if your customer needs more power, keeping in mind that denser stringbed patterns will have less power than more open stringbed patterns. Finally, take comfort in the fact that even if we had the specs of the old racquet on RacquetTECH.com, and matched it exactly to the specs of a new racquet, you’d still need to playtest the new frame to ensure that it is what your customer is seeking because some of the specs of the old frame may have changed since it was new. For example, the stiffness has probably gone down after years of use. But, following these procedures should help to narrow down the universe of racquets, and to just a handful to demo.

From the May 2006 issue
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