Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis String Reel
About Bad Salzuflen
This spa town in the Lippe district grew from salt springs along the Salze, a small tributary of the Werre. Salt was boiled here from the Middle Ages, and the graduation towers that once concentrated brine became part of the town’s state-recognized spa economy in 1914.
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Dunlop Synthetic Gut in 18 gauge, supplied as a 200-metre reel. It is the thinnest gauge in the family, and everything that follows comes from that.
The string itself is the standard synthetic gut construction — a solid nylon centre core inside wear-resistant outer filaments. The core gives the consistent, even response that makes nylon the default club string; the wraps absorb the abrasion at the crossing points. At 1.20 mm there is simply less of both.
A thinner string deflects further around the ball on contact and moves more easily between the crosses, so it delivers the most feel and the most spin of the three gauges. It also reaches the end of its life soonest, because the same amount of sawing takes proportionally more of the string away.
Eighteen gauge is chosen by players who want touch and are willing to restring for it.
Bad Salzuflen sits in Westphalia, where the winter is long, grey and wet and most of the season is played in indoor halls.
An indoor court is cleaner and less abrasive than a gritty outdoor one, which is where the thinnest gauge stops being an expensive habit and becomes a reasonable choice.
Specifications
| Type | Synthetic gut, solid nylon core |
|---|---|
| Construction | Solid core with wear-resistant outer wraps |
| Gauge | 18 / 1.20 mm |
| Reel length | 200 m / 660 ft |
| Characteristics | Maximum feel and spin, shortest life |
| Approximate racquets per reel | 16–18 |
| Best for | Touch players and indoor courts |
| Brand | Dunlop |
Buying 18 gauge by the reel is the practical answer to its one drawback: the string that wears out fastest is the one worth holding stock of.
LET Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis String Reel SHOW YOU Bad Salzuflen
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Look at these walls and tell me you can't reinvent yourself. Colossal timber frames packed with blackthorn twigs, brine trickling down them and evaporating. The first went up in 1767 under Johann Friedrich Constantin von Beust to concentrate brine for the salt pans; the works grew through the nineteenth century, the great Gradierwerk III finished by 1826. Industrial salt production ran until 1945 — and then it stopped. Career over. Except it wasn't. These towers became open-air inhalatoriums. Hundreds of thousands of litres still trickle down those thorn walls every day, filling the air with a sea-like mist people come here to breathe. Six centuries of salt-making, and a second act. Are you listening?
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Sixteenth century, and it was built by winners. Profits from the brine springs had made Salzuflen one of the most prosperous small towns in the Lippe region, and prosperous towns build like it — decorated gables, an oriel window, carved stone ornament, all of it Weser Renaissance, the exuberant style that flowered along the Weser valley in that age. This hall presided over a centre of merchants' houses whose façades still line Lange Strasse and the lanes around it, and it served the council for centuries while the town's living shifted from salt-making to the spa trade. Same building. New purpose. Write that down. With the timber-framed burgher houses around it, it keeps the wealthy salt town's face.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Every success has a floor under it, and this square is the floor. The Salzhof — the salt yard — is where brine from the town's springs was boiled into salt from the Middle Ages on. The documents reach back to the eleventh century, when a saltworks at Uflon was given to a Paderborn monastery, and by the late Middle Ages the salt pans had made this town rich enough to join the Hanseatic trading world and dress itself in Weser Renaissance stone. When the springs turned to medicinal use, the boiling ended and the works were cleared, leaving this open ground for markets and festivals. In 1988 Marianne Bleeke-Ehret cast a salt boiler in bronze here. Honour the people who did the work.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 18g Tennis Strings Reel: Here is the whole lesson of this town in one park. When the medicinal virtues of the brine springs began to be exploited in the nineteenth century, bathing houses rose beside the old saltworks, the town put Bad in front of its own name — it renamed itself, imagine the nerve — and from around 1900 laid out a spa park in the English landscape manner, later extended into the broad Landschaftsgarten that now runs from the graduation towers out into open meadow. Around it stand the pump rooms and bath houses of the spa's golden age, where guests took brine and carbonic acid baths. The springs, deep-drilled thermal sources among them, still supply the spa today. Walk it.
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.