Hey guys, I'm about to buy a second racket as a possible replacement for my "Babolat" (relatively well-known company here in Germany) "X-Feel Essential", as its strings broke last friday one day before a tournament and I didn't have any replacement myself , and stumbled across "apacs", which seems to produce relatively cheap decent rackets (max. budget: 60€/80US$). Playing three times a week for about 2 hours since 2010 (mostly doubles), I'd say I'm an intermediate player. I really like smashing hard, but also doing cross-drops or some nice deceptions (..as my name tells you already). Yet I prefer playing in the mid- or back-court. The new racket should be ~85g and perhaps a little bit head heavy, as my current racket lacks a bit of power. Concerning stiffness, I'm open-minded, hwat do you recommend? Now I had a look at some apacs rackets on eBay and saw the following ones that should suit me: -Visible Hollow 1800 -Finapi 88 -Lethal 9 -Nano 900 Power -Edgesaber 10 Peter Gade Edition -Stern 808 Where are the main differences between these rackets, what are your personal experiences with them (if you got some), are there other ones of interest and which one do you think would suit me the best? Thanks in advance for your advice!
Those are all clone rackets except for the VH1800, and their quality is not that good. Frankly, they'll all be relatively the same besides the paintjob. If you want to take a look at Apacs, you should try their higher end models. I bought a Lethal 70 recently and I like it a lot. It'll be stiffer than the X-Feel Essential, but I find that it's quite playable. It runs above your budget by a bit, but I believe that you end up saving more money in the long run by spending the money to buy a decent racket as opposed to some clone racket for cheap.
Are there really no noteworthy differences between these rackets? I know the higher-end models are said to be quite nice, yet I don't have the money to buy them - 80-90$ are the maximum I can pay for a replacement racket. Any reviews of the Visible Hollow 1800 or the Lethal 9? They seem the most fitting concerning my style of play and my budget!
I'd say VH1800 for sure. Dink has it in his racket review, here. It will probably be way better than the Lethal 9.
Then one last question: http://www.ebay.de/itm/APACS-VISIBL...298?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ebcffd092 <- here it says the racket weighs ~86g, in DinkALot's it says ~89g: Do you know which one is correct?
Note that the weight on Dink's review is the weight of his specific piece of that racket - 89g. 86g may be the spec given by Apacs or by the seller, but there are variations in weight from the manufacturing process. So they could both be right. I'm afraid I have no idea about that seller in particular, and don't have much general eBay knowledge to look for "signs" of whether it's a good or bad seller. Sorry.
Sportsnetbiz has a good rep, I've bought from him also. Pro_onesports is the one you should stay away from now.
I think I'm going to get the Visible Hollow von Sportsnetbiz within the next month. Thank you very much, BlueTornado and GaryC!
