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O3 50/50 stringing

I strung my O3 tour with a two-piece 50/50 pattern and — much to my delight — I didn’t need my table brake or the boomerang tool. If you string an O3 this way you are pulling from the middle of the frame to the top and bottom so the string is pulled in to the proper position and you can straighten the string before you clamp it.

5 sets of Head FXP 16 to:

Darren Litz, MRT, Portsmouth, OH

Editor’s note: For those not familiar with the two-piece 50/50 technique, you install the mains as normal, but you start the crosses from the middle of the hoop (that is, at the 3 o’clock or 9 o’clock position), working one end of the string toward the tip and the other toward the throat, in a fashion similar to that of installing the mains. It means two hard weaves instead of one, but if you don’t have a table brake and/or boomerang tool, or don’t like to use them, one extra hard weave is a small price to pay.

There are a couple of tricks to using this stringing method, though. First, don’t be too stingy when cutting your cross string to length, as on racquets with an odd number of crosses, you could run short on the side with the “extra” cross.

Next, you’ll have to locate the center of the stringbed when starting the crosses. On the O3 frames, this is usually on the side of the racquet where the O-ports start immediately below the bumperguard. Prince sometimes marks this as the short side of the racquet, but not always, and some O3 racquets have a bumperguard extender that might throw you off.

Because each Prince O3 racquet model has slightly different geometry, you may find that your first cross (either going up toward the head or down toward the throat) will still wander away from the frame. You should be able to counteract this tendency by holding the racquet, or in a worst-case scenario, turning the racquet slightly before clamping. From that point on, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Finally, depending on the type of stringing machine you have, you may need a starting clamp. This is because the clamp bases on many of the newer machines allow the clamps to run fully from the throat to the head, but not from side to side. This means you’ll have to start the crosses with a starting clamp, and use both machine clamps to install half of the crosses (toward the head, for instance), and then go back and install the other half. Make certain that you pad your starting clamp so it doesn’t scratch the racquet finish.

See all articles by Darren Litz

From the August 2008 issue
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