Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis String Set
About Nizwa
This inland city stands at the foot of the Hajar Mountains, where routes from the coast meet the interior oases. It was an early capital and a center of Ibadi scholarship, and its seventeenth-century fort reflects the period when the Ya'aruba imams controlled much of Oman from the interior.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Poly Tour Pro is Yonex’s control polyester, supplied here as a single 12 metre set for one frame in 16 gauge, 1.30 mm.
The string is a round co-polyester monofilament that Yonex pre-stretches during manufacture, and that process is the whole point of the product.
Polyester keeps stretching under tension after it leaves the stringing machine, which is why an untreated poly bed loses its level within a couple of weeks.
Pre-stretching removes most of that movement in advance, so the string bed holds where it was set. Measured static stiffness is around 0.9 kg/mm, firmer than Poly Tour Fire, and the character is control-forward: depth control for a fast, full swing rather than free power.
Nizwa lies in the Omani interior, where summer afternoons are extremely hot and dry, and heat is what pulls tension out of a polyester fastest, so a string built to hold its level has real work to do there.
Specifications
| Gauge | 16, 1.30 mm |
|---|---|
| Construction | Round co-polyester monofilament |
| Process | Pre-stretched during manufacture |
| Static stiffness | Approximately 0.9 kg/mm |
| Set length | 12 m |
| Characteristics | Firm, control-forward, high tension maintenance |
| Suited to | Advanced players with full swings |
Poly Tour Pro is the string many players move to when a softer polyester has stopped holding its tension long enough to be worth restringing. The 16 gauge is the thickest and most durable build in the Poly Tour Pro line, which makes the single set the straightforward choice for a player restringing a frame rather than a squad.
LET Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis String Set SHOW YOU Nizwa
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis Strings Set: Twelve years, 1656 to 1668, and every account credits Imam Sultan bin Saif bin Malik al-Ya'rubi, who ruled from 1649 to 1679 and who, with Nasir bin Murshid before him, drove the Portuguese off the Omani coast. Grand. Now count the shifts. That drum is 34 metres high and 45 across and packed solid with earth and stone for most of its height so it could absorb cannon fire and carry heavy artillery on top — and somebody hauled that fill up, load by load, for twelve years. The single winding stair, the blocking doors, the murder holes above them: all hand-cut. Names not recorded. Noted.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis Strings Set: This is where I am happiest, because a souq is a building full of people who actually make things. It sits where the routes from Muscat, Bahla and the Jebel Akhdar meet and has been the principal trading place of the Omani interior for centuries, with Nizwa silverwork and the curved khanjar traditionally associated with it — and behind every khanjar in that case is a silversmith who served years to learn the trade. The buildings were rebuilt in the 1990s in traditional materials while the market functions were kept, which is the correct order of priorities. The Friday goat market still runs as an open auction round the yard.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis Strings Set: Now this is a monument to labour. Falaj Daris is the largest falaj in Oman, drawing from Wadi al-Abyad, about eight kilometres long in two branches, and it is a daudi falaj, fed from a deep underground mother well and carried by gravity in a tunnel at a controlled gradient — the oldest and most demanding of the three Omani types. Men cut that tunnel by hand, underground, holding a gradient they could not see, and if they lost it the water stopped. UNESCO inscribed five representative aflaj of Oman in 2006, this among them. Water shares are owned, timed and traded separately from the land. Ask who holds them.
String: Yonex Polytour Pro 16g Tennis Strings Set: Bait al Redidah was built as a fortified house and administrative seat controlling the entrance to the wadi that gives access to the Jebel Akhdar, and it has been restored by the Omani authorities — restoration being, as ever, a great deal more skilled work than the plaque has room to name. The channel running past the wall is Falaj al Khatmeen, a daudi falaj about 2,450 metres long fed by Wadi al-Muaydin, one of the five aflaj inscribed by UNESCO in 2006. And that channel is the whole town: the banana plantations that give Birkat al Mawz its name, the pool of the bananas, depend entirely on it. Water first. Then the fort.
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