Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis String Reel
About Egilsstaðir
This town stands on the Lagarfljót in eastern Iceland and serves as an administrative and transport centre for Múlaþing. It grew in the twentieth century around road connections, local services, and the airport that links the eastern districts with Reykjavík.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Poly Tour Pro at 18 gauge is the finest version of Yonex’s control polyester, supplied here as a 200 metre reel.
The construction is a round co-polyester monofilament, pre-stretched during manufacture.
Pre-stretching removes most of the elongation that would otherwise happen after the string is in the frame, which is why tension maintenance stays exceptional rather than fading through the first fortnight.
Static stiffness measures around 0.9 kg/mm, firm and control-forward, with no free power in the bed.
The gauge is the decision. At this diameter the string sinks deepest into the ball and returns the most bite and spin it is capable of, and it has the shortest working life of the range.
A player who breaks strings will get very little out of it. A shotmaker who wants shape and precision, and who rarely breaks, will get the most the string has to give.
Egilsstaðir plays a short outdoor season in eastern Iceland and a long indoor one, and cold air stiffens a polyester further, so a thin gauge is the sensible way to keep some feel in a firm string bed.
Specifications
| Gauge | 18, 1.15 mm |
|---|---|
| Construction | Round co-polyester monofilament |
| Process | Pre-stretched during manufacture |
| Static stiffness | Approximately 0.9 kg/mm |
| Reel length | 200 m |
| Characteristics | Maximum bite and spin, shortest life in the range |
| Not recommended for | Frequent string breakers |
Buying the thinnest gauge on a reel is the standard answer to its shorter life, which is why the format exists.
LET Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis String Reel SHOW YOU Egilsstaðir
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Sorry — is this alright? I can stop. The lake covers about 53 square kilometres, runs some 25 kilometres long, reaches 2.5 wide, and drops to 112 metres deep, which is deeper than the sea around much of Iceland's coast, sorry, that came out like I was showing off. Its water is so heavily silted with glacial meltwater that it is almost opaque, and that is part of why the monster legend, the Lagarfljótsormur, has held on for centuries. It drains eventually to the Atlantic. Egilsstaðir sits on the east bank near the bridge, where the region's roads converge. Sorry. That was longer than I meant.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis Strings Reel: You are all still here. Sorry. This is the largest forest in Iceland, 740 hectares, and its surviving native birch wood was protected in 1905, which made it the country's first national forest — at a time when Iceland had been almost entirely stripped of trees since settlement, which I find quite sad, sorry, ignore that. Around 200 hectares have since been planted with introduced species, and 85 different tree species from over 600 locations worldwide grow here now, larch and spruce and pine and Douglas fir among them. And it contains Hallormsstaður, the only village in Iceland standing inside a forest. I will stop there.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis Strings Reel: I hope the walk was not too much — it is roughly forty minutes to an hour up from the car park and I should have said so first, sorry. This is the third highest waterfall in Iceland. The red bands in the cliff behind it are ancient soil horizons formed between successive lava flows, and they contain fossilised tree trunks and lignite, which is direct evidence that eastern Iceland was once warm enough and wooded enough to lay down coal. Sorry — I find that quite moving and I know that is odd. Lower down the same river, Litlanesfoss falls between walls of hexagonal columnar basalt. That is everything I have.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Just one more, if that is alright, and then I will leave you in peace. The writer Gunnar Gunnarsson had spent his career in Denmark and was one of the most widely read Nordic novelists of his day, and he came back to Iceland and built this house in 1939. The German architect Fritz Höger designed it, the one who did the Chilehaus in Hamburg. Beside it lie the ruins of a sixteenth-century monastery, revealed by excavation carried out between 2002 and 2012, and Snæfellsstofa, one of the visitor centres for Vatnajökull National Park, now stands on the same site. Thank you for listening. I genuinely was not expecting that.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.