How did Alan get the cross string through the shared grommets? by awl or string mover or . . . something else?
Ahhhh I finally can place faces to some of the people I read responses from. I'm truly sorry I could not be in attendance.
haha. the biggest drawback for ME was..... the controls are so delicate and light, it only requires a tiny force to activate it. when i used it, for THREE TIMES, i accidentally lightly bumped the clamp and it disengaged. causing me to lose tension and had to restart from scratch. otherwise, it is an awesome machine. the tension head is quiet and fast. it reacts to any external perturbations really well and maintains the tension. all details are very well thought of. the tensioner don't need a switch to activate, just place the string in the gripper and pull, it will activate the tensioner. i thought that is very cool. mechanically everything is very smooth, the swivel clamps are like dripped in oil smooth, almost no force is needed to move them and similarly for engaging and disengaging them. for disengage, just ungrip the clamp, drop it, and that action will disengage the clamp's base as well. so double action engage, but single action disengage. i had so much fun playing with that. but most of us agree, for $7000+, we will just have to visit AK more if we want to play with it...
just want to put in a few words on the event itself. i think the inaugural Bay Area Stringfest was a success. we had around 10-15 people showed up at various point in time. the stringfest really started after the pizza arrived. after we filled out stomach, we chat and socialized a little bit talking about stringing and other things. then we had a little discussion and tutorial from AK about stringing. AK and everyone else generously shared some tips on things to watch out for while stringing. and then AK demonstrated to everybody his stringing, explaining on various details and some more tips. it was really nice to watch and learn at the same time. i have video of the process that i will share, but do give me sometime to edit and upload. after that, everyone went off and tried out different machine, most of us are eager to try AK's ES5Pro and ES5Protech. due to my 3 mishaps, i must have hogged the Protech for more than an hour. in that time, AK already went and strung a customer's racket and then another person almost finished his job! after that, we just keep on stringing and hanged out more while AK deals with more customers. it was a busy, fun and very good learning experience for me. i hope everyone who attended enjoyed it also!
oh, and i forgot to mention, all attendees got a goodie bag filled with stringing stuff from various sponsors: - grommets from Alpha - NBG95 string and Grap from Yonex - Zymax 67 and 62 strings from Ashaway and a nice parts box that AK included to put the grommet in.
Yo finally some down time!! Thanks to everyone who showed up to make this an EVENT. Thanks to Yonex Corp., Ashaway , and Alpha Tennis for supplying string Grips and grommets. Thanks to Alan T and Kwun for bringing their machines. I had a lot of fun and did learn myself some little things to help me in my stringing career. Hopefully we can do this again next year at a club!! Thanks again to everyone who made this happen!!
Very good and sounds very fun!!.. ..so, did anyone try out master kwun's hybrid WASE machine?? Anyone else w/opinions on it? What do you think of his machine, Alan??.. ..bro, for a second, i thought you were going to take it home and continue to play on with it.. Thanks for capturing the event and sharing the pics with us!!.. *now, awaiting kwun's video..
haha...too bad we didn't caught that with your camcorder, or else...it gonna be youtube o...I think I totally missed that one, haha (those white YY bags?) no alan...thank you a lot for host this and a great gathering... a.t