Black Knight Pro-X

Just spotted the Black Knight Pro-X squash racket in 2020 at SquashGalaxy. I’m hearing this racket will be exclusively offered in the US market.

Note: In 2021, Black Knight released a Canada-only version of this frame called the Black Knight Instinct.

I’ve tested out this racket and you can check out my review below.

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Here’s some more product info on Black Knight’s website (thanks Stu).

A new feature frame sold exclusively in the USA for 2020! The PRO-X is a lightweight teardrop frame that has had great feedback and aggressive balance. Featuring a large sweet spot, and a unique rigid cross section profile, ball striking is very precise with the large 490 cm frame.  This, combined with Ashaway’s new MultiNick 18 String impresses with a fantastic level of power and control. Available only in the USA

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Reviews

Here’s my review of this racket!

If you can’t watch ir right now, please see this transcript, which YouTube auto-generated and then I lightly edited:

What’s up squash players I have a review today of the Black Knight Pro-X squash racquet.

This racquet is available exclusively in the United States so if you’re overseas, sorry, you’re gonna have to order it immediately from the US because this is actually a great racket which I’ll tell you about in a second.

First of all this is a — I think it came out in 2019 — at the tail end of that. It’s relatively new. Big thanks to Black Knight — to Ray from Black Knight — for sending me this racquet to review for you.

We have a stringing pattern of 14 by 18. It’s a teardrop shape with a traditional stringing pattern (straight up and down).

The grip is not exactly on the large size but regular size grip here. And it is strung with Ashaway string, as Black Knight racquets tend to be. I think this one is MultiNick 18.

This racquet weighs 146.7 grams and for the first time ever I got myself two scales on the advice of a Squash Source reader whose name I might mispronounce but I think it’s Tjeerd. I think it’s Dutch. Hi. Thanks for the tip.

He had suggested I get two scales and lay the tip of the racket on one and the butt of the racket on the other. Identical scales. And so 83.4 grams in the head and 63.3 grams in the butt of the racket, which I think is telling me — just to skip past all the numbers — that this is actually a little bit head heavy.

On the frame it says it has a dynamic … a regular weight of 130. This is by the way the unstrung weight. This is 130 gram racket, all in 146.7. It says that the dynamic weight is below that, 125, so in Black Knight’s terminology I think that means that it’s supposed to be head light. But I felt it was just like a touch head heavy which is my personal favorite type of feel and part of the reason I really liked this racket.

So we’ll see. I have to come out with a little bit of a separate video on that weighing process because I’m new to it. But I did get myself a second identical scale so that I could do this. Right.

I got tons of both power and control with this racket. I actually loved this racket. It has a huge sweet spot. I feel like if you want to generate power you can get a lot of it off of this shape. It feels like a big sweet spot.

I think the strings feel really nice. Sometimes a factory stringing job can feel like a little dead I guess, and often I like that, but in this particular case the strings felt very lively. I was able to get a lot of power out of it [clip] and I was also able to develop touch really well with this and partly just with a short backswing. You didn’t have to put a whole lot on it but it didn’t feel like it was bouncing off uncontrollably, it felt controlled and I was able to kind of just softly leave drops very short with a minimal backswing.

I used this probably for about two weeks in testing and just overall thought it was excellent. The sound of it — it’s the only thing — it didn’t feel weird at all in the hitting but sometimes you get like a weird pinging sort of sound. It just sounds normal when I do it here. But it felt completely normal at all times.

So I definitely strongly recommend this one. I’m not gonna switch to it because I just got a couple of my other ones — my current racket that I’m still using … I’m happily using. But actually I switched back to that a couple days ago since I’ve been meaning to do this review and I had trouble switching back to my current racket and so that was just I guess a credit to the Black Knight Pro-X which is an excellent frame.

The Pro-X costs $165 (US) and like I said it came out either this year or last year and I know that it is available at least at SquashGalaxy and Holabird but it’s going to be available just in the US market.

So check it out, that is the Black Knight Pro-X. Hopefully that was helpful. If you like these reviews hit like and I’ll see you the next one. Thanks.