If you are a keen social tennis player and you’re fed up with always taking your racquet to the pro shop for re-stringing then you have probably said to yourself I should buy a tennis stringing machine. The question is, which one?

Most people opt for a tennis stringing machine with a drop weight tensioning system for their first purchase. This is because of the price. However, it is not necessarily the best choice.

It is true that a tennis stringing machine with a drop weight tensioning system is usually the most accurate machine and it is also the cheapest but there are a few other features to consider before you make your decision. An electronic tennis stringing machine is the ultimate in stringing machines but it tends to be limited to professionals because it is expensive. In between these two types of machines is the manual spring tension winder tennis stringing machine.

The main advantage of the spring tension winder stringing machine is that it is fast. It is a lot faster than a drop weight machine. You may not think that this is important but if you start stringing for more than one member of the family you will want to speed up the process.

Generally, the spring tension winder tennis stringing machine is thought to be less accurate than a drop weight stringing machine. There are two factors to consider here. Firstly, the winder stringing machine is very consistent. This means that if you find the tension on your machine that suits your racquet and your game then you can replicate it again and again. However, the second factor is that if you buy a high quality winder stringing machine such as the Gamma X-ST tennis stringing machine most people say it is simply a matter of turning the winder slowly to achieve an accurate result with regard to tension. This makes it sound as though it will take a lot longer to string your racquet but it is not the case, you can still string a lot faster than the time it will take on a drop weight stringing machine.

There are, of course, other factors to consider such as the clamps used on your stringing machine: fixed or floating; single or dual action; method of gripping the string; type of tensioning gripper; and the list goes on.